A Decade of GigaScience: Milestones in Open Science

Abstract

Open Science has gained momentum over the past decade, and embracing that, GigaScience, from its launch a decade ago has aimed at pushing scientific publishing beyond just making articles open access toward making the entire research process open and available as an embedded part of the publishing process. Before the journal's launch in July 2012, the editors aimed to make publishing more than a narrative presentation of work already done into a fully open process. Major milestones include creating our own data repository, embracing FAIR principles, promoting and integrating preprints, and working with other platforms to contribute to a 21st century publishing infrastructure. Almost 10 years after GigaScience's launch, UNESCO published its Open Science Recommendations. With these in mind, looking back, we are happy to have contributed in various ways to UNESCO's aim to "foster a culture of Open Science and aligning incentives for Open Science" from the very beginning, and, more, to use those recommendations to guide our path into the future: to truly embrace the full spectrum of information, tools, and access to Open Science for all participants in scientific endeavours.

Figure 1:

The UNESCO Open Science Recommendations lay out four pillars of Open Science (figure adapted from CC-BY graphics in the UNESCO Recommendations [7]). Since its launch 10 years ago, GigaScience has worked toward creating Open Science within the publishing arena. The pillars here provide a map for us to see where we've been, but also where we need to go to to continue to achieve our goals. For “Open Science Knowledge,” we have our mandated creative commons CC-BY licence for narrative content, CC0 waivers for data, and OSI and OSHW licences for open source software and hardware. We have promoted open data by developing our in-house GigaDB repository and have mandated data from our publications be hosted here or in a community supported open database. We also require authors make their source code available through GitHub. Through integration with preprint servers and open peer review platforms such as publons, bioRxiv and Sciety, we have promoted transparency and early access to knowledge. For the “Open Science Infrastructure,” we've set up third-party integrations to allow interaction with content such as protocols.io, hypothes.is, sketchfab, Stencila, CodeOcean and our GigaGalaxy.net server. Participation in the physical space has been through “Bring Your Own Data” parties and Carpentries workshops. While we have begun work on “Open Engagement of Societal Actors,” this remains a work in progress, as it has not been embedded in our publishing workflows, but we have experimented in this arena through our BauhiniaGenome citizen science projects, as well as support and promotion of hackathons and open innovation projects, such by being judges for the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) student competition. The area requiring the greatest effort for the future is under the pillar of “Open Dialogue with other Knowledge systems.” Here, we have begun that process by reducing the barriers of cost and language. While we do require authors to follow proper regulations and ethical standards via crediting indigenous and community knowledge in our processes, this is not yet actively promoted as part of our publishing activities. This fourth pillar is clearly the arena we are looking toward embracing as we move into our second decade of publishing.