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GSC/BGI logoTo tie in with this week’s Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) meeting in Shenzhen, GigaScience is launching a call for submissions to a thematic series of discussion and research from the conference and wider community highlighting best practice in genomics research.

As the 13th meeting of the GSC, the topic this year is “Genomes to Interactions to Communities to Models” – all areas key to the scope of the journal. As the conference is hosted by BGI Shenzhen, the world’s largest Genomics Organization, the overarching theme this year: “the rise of the megasequencing project“, was part of the rationale for BGI to launch GigaScience with BioMed Central.

With Susanna-Assunta Sansone (co-founder of BioSharing – of which BioMed Centraland GigaScience are both members, GigaScience is co-chairing a panel on Policies and Standards for Reproducible Research: from Theory to Practice, attended by a wide-spectrum of stakeholders in the production and handling of data such as editors (including Clare Garvey of Genome Biology), funders, databases and data-producers. On top of the novel publication format combining large-scale biological dataset hosting on the GigaDB database, GigaScience journal hopes this series can be a forum for discussion that can help further its aims to revolutionize data dissemination, organization, understanding, and use. GigaScience is also taking submissions on cloud  computing, software for data handling, and research highlighting best practices in use of standards and data-sharing for the series, as these are all key to open-up research as we enter the era of “big-data”.

BGI is generously covering the open-access article-processing charges for the journal’s first year, so please contact us at editorial@gigasciencejournal.com if you have related work you would like to submit to this series or journal, or submit a manuscript here.

Follow the conference on Twitter at @gigascience and the #gsc13 hashtag. Slides will be made available from slideshare, GigaBlog, and the conference wiki.