Spotlight on: GigaByte
Written by 19 August 2022
This year, the judges have selected a shortlist of seven for the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing. Each finalist will be invited to showcase their innovation to industry peers on 14 September on the opening day of the ALPSP 2022 Conference in Manchester. The winners will be announced at the Awards Dinner on Thursday 15 September.
In this series, we learn more about each of the finalists.
https://www.gigabyte.com/Tell us about your organization
GigaScience
Press is an Open Access Publisher, based in Hong Kong, that publishes journal
articles and accompanying datasets and software. It is a division of BGI
Research, a non-profit research institute that is part of the genomics
organisation BGI-Group.
What is the project/product that
you submitted for the Awards?
GigaByte is a new journal and data publishing platform that rapidly and cost-effectively shares
research in a manner that makes the scientific process more inclusive and
accessible to the broader community. GigaByte uses an exclusively
XML-based publishing system that automates the production process and makes it
effortless to change views, languages and embed interactive content. The
journal breaks down many of the remaining access barriers in research, which helps to
address the UNESCO Open Science Recommendations.
Tell us a little about how it works
and the team behind it
GigaByte was developed by the GigaScience Press team with the goal of
speeding up the publishing process, reducing cost, and changing the way scientific
research could be more broadly accessed and used within the publishing process.
GigaScience Press partnered with River Valley Technologies to build a new
end-to-end XML-first publishing platform that would make these goals a reality. The
journal editorial team are employed by BGI and are primarily based in Hong Kong
and mainland China, alongside a team of professional data scientists and
curators in the UK who work with authors to assist them in curating their data
and preparing dynamic content. The combination of the GigaScience Press, with
their extensive knowledge of scientific publishing and areas needing change,
and River Valley Technologies, with their novel technological publishing
solutions, enabled the production of a new platform that changes the current
slow and limited scientific publishing methods, and created not only a unique
new journal, but also a partnership that works synergistically to develop new
and better ways to provide, present, and use research.
In what ways do you think it
demonstrates innovation?
The outputs from GigaByte’s novel
publishing workflow transforms the research article from a stagnant narrative
describing what the researchers have done, to something that can be utilised by
a much wider audience, including formerly inaccessible elements that underlie
the narrative. The journal dramatically increases interactivity of
content through embedded data visualization tools (for NMR spectra, 3D models,
genomic maps and more), browsable maps, and video summaries, all of which,
beyond usability, improves trust in the scientific findings. More, the journal
crucially improves accessibility to authors and readers around the world
by enabling the articles to be shared in a bilingual format (with examples
published in Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese, alongside the English language
version-of-record), and linking them to regional preprint servers such as
AfricaXiv and SciELO Preprints. The journal is also beginning the process
of tackling the cost-barrier of Open-Access, due to its primarily automated
production process, where, upon acceptance, the publishing platform converts
manuscripts to online- and PDF-ready articles within hours with minimal human
intervention. This dramatically reduces both production time and cost,
providing an equitable solution to publishing open science.
What are your plans for the future?
Leveraging
the cost savings of this platform, we’ve published a series of papers crediting the
outputs of a public college student project on an agricultural pathogen
that has decimated their communities, and a series
of articles sponsored by the WHO, that
shares extremely important public health datasets from across the world.
Working directly with the funders and consortia who handle these important
public interest projects is a more cost-effective and equitable way to
disseminate their research outputs openly. Having completed this type of
journal-to-consortia and funder process for scientific publication, we are in
the stages of formalising this process and engaging with organizations to
expand these efforts further. Beyond creating article series, GigaScience Press
is in the development stage for launching new journals using this approach and
publishing platform, and for offering a cost-effective and interactive solution
for other journals that want to use our expertise to improve their own
publication workflows in a similarly Open Science friendly manner.
About the author
Scott
Edmunds is the Hong Kong based Chief Editor for GigaByte Journal. With
over 15 years experience in Open Access and Open Data publishing he is
co-founder of CivicSight (formerly Open Data Hong Kong) and
CitizenScience.Asia, and is Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of the Dryad
Digital Repository.
Relevant web links
https://www.linkedin.com/company/gigascience/
https://www.facebook.com/GigaByteJournal
