Over the last month, we have added two new groups, GigaScience and GigaByte, from the journals of the same name, increasing the number of specialist teams displaying their evaluations on Sciety.
GigaScience and GigaByte are part of GigaScience Press. With a decade-long history of open-science publishing, they aim to revolutionise publishing by promoting reproducibility of analyses and data dissemination, organisation, understanding, and use. As open-access and open-data journals, they publish all research objects (publishing data, software and workflows) from 'big data' studies across the life and biomedical sciences. These resources are managed using the FAIR Principles for scientific data management and stewardship, which state that research data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. They also follow the practices of transparency and openness in science publishing, and as such, they embrace open peer review (which is mandated for both journals) and preprints (which are strongly encouraged in GigaScience and mandated for GigaByte). The opportunities for combining both are covered by GigaScience in its video on open science and preprint peer review for Peer Review Week.
Joining Sciety furthers the journals’ aims and increases their and our opportunities to share their evaluations with a broader audience. For Sciety, GigaScience and GigaByte increase value for users, with the potential to provide multiple reviews, and therefore more enriching activities, on preprints. This can help amplify trust in scientific outputs by offering clear reference points to judge the quality of a preprint.
GigaScience Press is the Open Access Publishing division of BGI group. Using BGI’s computational infrastructure and expertise, it offers a new “integrated publishing” model of an open-access journal. GigaScience publishes life science and biomedical research that uses "big data" and can link these articles to their accompanying research objects via their GigaDB repository. Published articles include topics that go beyond genomics and other high-throughput biology, which have data that is currently well served by public repositories. The journal also covers articles that can have difficult-to-access data types, such as imaging, neuroscience, ecology, and network data, as well as systems biology and other new types of large-scale data.
GigaByte, on the other hand, is a new journal launched in 2020, with the aim of promoting the most rapid exchange of scientific information on a formal peer-reviewed publishing platform. The journal is focused on publishing short descriptive reports that provide updates or ongoing adjustments in big data research. It also uses a novel, end-to-end XML platform from River Valley Technologies, allowing for a quicker and more cost-effective publication process better designed for these more granular research objects that don’t require such a labour-intensive and detailed vehicle for sharing.
Scott Edmunds, Editor-in-Chief of GigaScience Press, says: “As open-science journals that proactively promote open peer review and preprint use (our GigaByte journal mandating both), we are very excited to work with Sciety to help bring these two complementary features of more transparent research together in one place. Linking our open reviews to corresponding preprints and curating them on Sciety will help make them much more discoverable for scrutiny and reuse.”
Paul Shannon, eLife Head of Technology and Innovation, adds: “We’ve shared ideas around open science and technology with GigaScience Press for a few years so having the opportunity to work together with groups on Sciety is a great step forward for us. Their enthusiasm for the curation aspects that Sciety is starting to offer is really exciting, so I’m looking forward to exploring how we can get the most out of their content and giving their readers a new way to find and discover this growing area of data-focused biomedical and life science publishing.”
GigaScience Press’ model of open and transparent review was outlined by Scott Edmunds in the “New ways of open preprint review” session organised by Sciety at last year's Open Publishing Fest, and the archived video of this event can be viewed here.
Sciety is proud to welcome these astute groups onto our application because we are confident that their reviews will contribute to the steady momentum of the growing innovations on scientific dissemination through the circulation of preprints. If your group would like to display their preprints activities on Sciety, please click here to get in touch with us.
