Gigascience Offers Readers More Than Just Open-Source Papers

The inaugural issue of Gigascience — together with its sister database GigaDB — is now available.

GigaScience describes itself as an online, open-access, open-data journal that takes submissions related to life sciences that use large-scale data. What makes Gigascience interesting is that standard manuscript publications are offered with an extensive database that hosts all the related data in the study as well as analysis tools and cloud-computing resources.

For example, a research article by the University College London's Stephan Beck that looks at whole-genome analysis of DNA methylation is available with a 84 gigabyte supplemental file of research data.

The first issue features papers by EMBL-Bioinformatics Institute's Guy Cochrane on the future of DNA sequence archiving and Cold Spring Harbor's Michael Schatz discussing the concept of a "digital immune system" comprised of 'omics data to improve public health.

Gigascience is published in a joint effort by BGI and BioMed Central.

Matthew Dublin is a senior writer at Genome Technology.