A Decade of GigaScience: GigaDB and the Open Data Movement

Abstract

The increasingly multidisciplinary nature of scientific research necessitates a need for Open Data repositories that can archive data in support of publications in scientific journals. Recognising this need, even before GigaScience launched in 2012, GigaDB was already in place and taking data for a year before (making it 11 this year). Since GigaDB launched, there has been a consistent growth in this resource in terms of data volume, data discoverability and data re-use. In this commentary, we provide a retrospective of key changes over the last decade, and the role of Data Curation in enhancing the user experience. Furthermore we explore a much needed emphasis on enabling researchers to interact with and explore datasets prior to data download.

A Decade of GigaScience: Milestones in Open Science

“…It has been great to witness this embrace of data publication become mainstream, with Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and many of the other big publishers following in our footsteps over the next few years. Where we differed from these other data publishers was leveraging the resources and expertise of our parental entity BGI (a genomics organisation) to host our own data repository, GigaDB—filling the gaps in data hosting, and providing on-hand curation and support from our in-house team of data experts (see the 10-year overview of GigaDB published alongside this piece [ 4 ]).…”

PEPhub: a database, web interface, and API for editing, sharing, and validating biological sample metadata

“…The rapid pace of biological data generation has led to challenges with data sharing, storage, and integration [1][2][3][4]. Growing interest in data reusability and interoperability [5,6] has led to new effort in improving biological data sharing and accessibility [7][8][9].…”