Latest posts
1, 2, 3, 4 Get with the Wiki!
Scott Edmunds - July 25, 2012
Type any scientific term into any search engine and its pretty much guaranteed that a Wikipedia article will be the first hit. Many in the scientific community have been sceptical that a free website maintained by untrained volunteers should dominate the global provision of knowledge, but a growing number of researchers are deciding that it […]
The FENS Forum: A Good Time to Be in Spain
Alexandra Basford - July 19, 2012
This year is the “Year of Neuroscience” in Spain. As a part of this educational movement and celebration of the most recent flowering of Spanish neuroscience, Barcelona hosted the FENS Forum of Neuroscience. Drawing what the Chair of the Host Committee, Mara Dierssen, described as the largest number of attendees ever, the 8th FENS meeting […]
Searching for the (Open) Source at Long Beach
Scott Edmunds - July 16, 2012
As a project with the aim of revolutionizing data dissemination and use, on top of promoting open-access and open-data, open-source is a key part of the open-science equation, and this week GigaScience has been at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC2012 – program here) in Long Beach. Sponsored by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (O|B|F), BOSC […]
GigaScience launches: overseeing the transition from papers to “executable research objects”
Scott Edmunds - July 12, 2012
Research papers have been the predominant form of scholarly communication for the past few centuries, and despite moves towards online publication and open access, the process and structure of publication has not fundamentally changed in that time. With biological and biomedical research becoming increasingly data-driven, and the amount of information, computational tools, and code supporting […]
Lessons From the “Data Publication Spring”: DataCite Summer 2012
Scott Edmunds - June 29, 2012
Readers of this blog will be well versed on our and others work using DataCite Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to cite data, and this months DataCite summer meeting in Copenhagen was a good opportunity to take stock of the many recent developments in the area of data publication, with the last six months being particularly […]
The (genomics) view from the 57th floor
Scott Edmunds - June 22, 2012
In a busy summer for meetings, this month we attended and presented at Bio-IT World Asia conference in Singapore. In this era of more globalized biology, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the usually Boston based conference series, with Bio-IT World substituted their usual New England lobster for Chili Crab and heading east. The meetings […]
A conference, neuroimaging, and the wealth of computational neuroscience
Alexandra Basford - June 18, 2012
I was fortunate in being able to attend 18th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM2012). It was a nice turnout, especially considering the long distances many of the attendees traveled to attend the conference in Beijing. Very exciting was the record number of Chinese delegates, a trend the organization would like to see […]
Adventures in Data Citation: sorghum as a standard for data release
Scott Edmunds - May 11, 2012
A correspondence we have contributed to has just been published in the BMC Research Notes “Data standardization, sharing and publication series” on the data-citation and data-release practices surrounding the Sorghum genome that is available in our GigaDB database and that was published last year in Genome Biology. We use Sorghum as an example to highlight […]
Shanghai (Epigenomics) Surprise
Scott Edmunds - April 30, 2012
With genetics and genomics being complicated enough, epigenomics adds even more layers of control and regulation of gene expression, and high-throughput global analyses of epigenetic changes further add to the reams of biological information many people are already referring to as the "data-deluge". As the field is a key part of our “big-data” scope, the […]
The State of the Curation Nation
Scott Edmunds - April 3, 2012
Of the of the many issues needing addressing in this era of the so-called “data deluge” (apologies genomics bingo), on top of the well documented difficulties in computing power, bandwidth and storage keeping pace with data production, less attention has been paid on the efforts required to present and package this biological information to users. […]