Yesterday I told you all about the Researcher to Reader (R2R) conference and its debate on the proposition “The venue of its publication tells us nothing useful about the quality of a paper”. I posted the opening statement for the proposition, which was co-written by Toby Green and me. Now here is the opening statement against the proposition, presented by Pippa Smart of Learned Publishing , having been co-written by

This Monday and Tuesday, I was at the R2R (Researcher to Reader) conference at BMA House in London.

This is the last blog post of 2019 and it is time again to look back at some of the amazing research published in GigaScience over the past year. Besides handling manuscripts, reviews and data, the editors and curators also attended conferences near and far, they contributed to policy discussions and prepared the launch of a new journal, GigaByte. More about all these activities below.

The Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington DC was the venue for this year’s ASCB|EMBO 2019 Meeting that took place on 7-11 December 2019. The American Society of Cell Biology conference, now merged with the EMBO meeting, is the largest yearly gathering for the cell imaging community, and GigaScience has attended in the past.

EMBL Heidelberg was the venue for the EMBL Symposium: Seeing is Believing – Imaging the Molecular Processes of Life that took place on 9-12 October 2019. This was the second EMBL meeting on imaging data we attending this year after VIZBI (see the write-up here), GigaScience Data Scientist Chris Armit was there and was astonished at how recent breakthroughs in imaging technology are enlightening our understanding of the Life Sciences.

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As usual I came back from SVPCA to a mountain of un-dealt-with day-job work, which is why it’s taken me so long to get this post done and up. I wanted to get it posted as quickly as I could decently arrange, because I had a fantastic time at this year’s meeting and I wanted to document a few reasons why, both to thank this year’s hosts and to perhaps inspire the organizers of future meetings.

I’ll have more to say about both of these in the near future, but for now suffice it to say that this (link): {.aligncenter .wp-image-16586 .size-large loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“16586” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2019/09/25/the-atterholt-wedel-and-plain-old-wedel-talks-from-svpca-2019-are-now-peerj-preprints/atterholt-and-wedel-2019-svpca-neural-canal-ridges-title-slide/”

We’re just back from an excellent SVPCA on the Isle of Wight. We’ll write more about it, but this time I just want to draw attention to a neat find. During a bit of down time, Matt and Vicki were wandering around West Cowes (the town where the scientific sessions were held), when they stumbled across a place called That Shop. Intrigued by all the Lego figures in the window, they went in, and Matt found a small section of fossils.

The view from the Marie Sklodowska Curie Museum, where Marie lived as a child. This year’s Neuroinformatics 2019 meeting took place in the beautiful and historic city of Warszawa (Warsaw). Warszawa remains a pilgrimage city for scientists, with arguably its most famous resident Marie Sklodowska Curie being the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the only person ever to win the Nobel Prize twice in two different scientific fields.