Current practices in scientific publishing are unsuitable for rapidly changing fields and for releasing updatable data sets and software tools. GigaByte aims to be a new way to publish research following the software paradigm: CODE, RELEASE, FORK, UPDATE and REPEAT. Opening the final barriers in Open Science, you can see more in the following video: https://youtu.be/Hno4C0Xh_4k
GigaByte publishes life science and biomedical research that is focused on the production and use of biological openly-shareable data and open source computational tools used in analysing such data.
The journal and its associated database, GigaDB, link the article to their accompanying research objects (data, source code, etc that underlie the work) with DOIs and other persistent identifiers (PIDs). Published articles showcase open data, computational workflows and tools from these rapidly advancing fields of biology and biomedicine.
GigaByte is published by GigaScience Press (ISNI:0000 0004 7882 355X), which publishes journal articles and accompanying datasets and software. This is the Open Access Publishing division of the non-profit research branch of BGI, committed to multi-disciplinary research and development in life science, biotechnology and healthcare application. This work is carried out in collaboration with International publishers and infrastructure providers, including Oxford University Press, River Valley Technologies, ORCID, CrossRef, CLOCKSS, and DataCite. For more see gigasciencepress.com
All our papers are published with the Creative Commons - Attribution License 4.0 (CC-BY).
The APC is currently $535 USD.
Given the current extremely high cost of publishing in the majority of open access journals, after the first year, we will be looking toward ways to keep our APCs as low as possible. Our aim is only to cover our costs: not to take advantage of grant funds that are aimed at promoting research, and not to make profit by any business or investor. Once APCs are in place, we will provide transparency on our costs so that authors and granting organizations have a clear understanding of what an APC covers.
We have been implementing APCs that match this goal, with prices that will be affordable and transparent, and also integrated into the new Open Access Switchboard to allow seamless reporting and payments from institutions and funders with centralised Open Access funds. On top of waivers to prevent access to publication being a barrier to those without such funding (please contact us if you require assistance). Taking a 10% margin on top of our groundbreakingly cost effective publishing workflow to cover future development of the journal, from 1st January 2025 this is $535 USD.
Being based in Hong Kong there is no sales tax or VAT added to this price, and we can take payments by bank transfer or credit card (with a credit card transaction fee).
All articles published in GigaByte are open access, which means the articles are universally and freely available online. In addition, the authors retain copyright of their article, and grant any third party the right to use, reproduce and disseminate the article, subject to the terms of our copyright and license agreement. Allowing the authors to retain copyright of their work permits wider distribution of their work on the condition it is correctly attributed to the authors.
All data supporting our publications needs to be published under a Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain waiver. It is widely recognized that publicly funded research data should be made publicly available for free to be used by anyone. The Creative Commons Zero (CC0) waiver provides the explicit statement of that fact, and it is transparent to all that the data hosted in our associated GigaDB repository are all freely available for any use case. CC0 is thought to be the most appropriate method for dedicating data to the public domain, but for more on the rationale and practicalities see this BMC Research Notes editorial. Citation of data usage is greatly encouraged in order to provide the recognition to the data producers, both for their efforts in the production and in their foresight and generosity in making the data CC0.
Articles in GigaByte should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. And as an online journal, GigaByte does not have issue numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number and a crossref digital object identifier that can be quoted.
Yes, all papers are openly and transparently peer reviewed by at least two experts in their field.
GigaByte has a fully open (non-anonymous) peer-review as it improves the transparency of review processes and publication as a whole. For more see our Editorial and Reviewer guidelines. We also have a questionnaire-style review process to guide and speed up peer review.
GigaByte is published online only. If you wish to print out a copy of an article, we recommend you select the PDF version of the article online. PDFs of all articles have been formatted in a way that is ideal for printing, so, if you prefer, articles don't have to be read on screen.
GigaByte is an online only journal which immediately publishes accepted articles; it is not a serial publication. Leveraging our XML-first publishing workflow production and proofing is semi-automated and rapid.
As a new journal we are working to index our papers as widely as possible although this takes time to meet the criteria of publications and pass the review process. The journal is currently indexed in Pubmed, PubMed Central (PMC), Europe PMC, Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index (ECSI), Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews, Scopus, googlescholar, Hinari, CNKI, ASCI and JGate and has the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) seal for journals that demonstrate best practice in open access publishing. To meet funder Open Access mandates our content is automatically deposited and mirrored in PMC. We issue CrossRef DOIs and our ISSN is ISSN:2709-4715.
GigaByte can host all the relevant data and tools from articles published in the journal in its affiliated database, GigaDB. Supporting the open-data movement, data in GigaDB is released under a public domain CC0 waiver. For information on how to submit data with your manuscript, see the GigaDB homepage.
The GigaByte curators ([email protected]) will contact you with information where to submit your data and other associated Research Objects after you have submitted your manuscript.
Data Release articles highlight and help to contextualize exceptional datasets to encourage reuse. All data can be linked to the Data Note via our GigaDB repository (GigaDB). Data Release articles focus on a particular dataset, and provide detailed methodology on data production, validation, and potential reuse. Supporting the FAIR Principles for scientific data management and stewardship that state that research data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Manuscripts containing more detailed biological, medical or technical analyses of data should be submitted to our sister publication GigaScience Journal as a Research Article.
Technical Release articles are a short structured report presenting an open-source software tool or an experimental or computational method, test or procedure for the analysis or handling of research data. Web servers and database articles are also considered.
Update articles serve as a way to publish new data or software information from a previously published article at a time point where there is useful information to share but there are little to no new analyses, conceptual findings, or new software versions completed. Speeding up the sharing of information by removing the need to wait until enough work has been done to be considered a “publishable unit” by most other journals.
GigaByte is focussed on less-complex, stand-alone datasets and software reports that have more limited conceptual narrative than GigaScience. Which complements these shorter reports with more comprehensive overviews bringing these resources together. Community use and reuse of data and tools being the primary aim, crediting still useful research objects that might be otherwise ignored, but that are of value to more specialist communities.
Using a novel, end-to-end XML platform, means this can be done in a quicker and more cost-effective manner better designed for these more granular research objects that don’t require such a labour intensive and detailed vehicle for sharing.
Our Open Access Policy goes beyond thinking about our human readers, to assisting machine readability and automated analysis of text and data (i.e. text and data mining or TDM). We strongly support the stance that the right to read is the right to mine. GigaByte articles may be mined, reused, and shared by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose. To assist this we have opened up our complete content stores to TDM efforts by providing download access for our complete Open Access corpus via this page, all released under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license.
GigaByte has a RSS feed presenting our feed available from here:
https://gigabytejournal.com/feed/rss_feed.xml
We also have a text mining portal allowing bulk download of all our XML:
https://gigabytejournal.com/text-and-data-mining
These are accessible via the small buttons on the top-right of our homepage.
GigaByte promotes a more rapid “open science” mechanisms for disseminating research, and preprint availability is key to reduce the delay between discovery and dissemination of results. To increase transparency and speed up dissemination GigaByte promotes a “release then review” model of scientific communication, and connects to previously published preprint versions that are crosslinked and highlighted via the Article Information section of our articles. Please submit to relevent pre-print servers where you can and provide the details of these to the Editors upon submission or at the latest during peer review.
We encourage the citation of preprints where appropriate in the reference list, and as with our policy encouraging replication studies will not consider them in the evaluation of the conceptual advance of a manuscript submitted for publication.
Use of AI-writing tools such as ChatGPT is allowed as long as it is disclosed in a transparent manner and does not negatively affect empirical data and conclusions. AI-writing tools must be highlighted wherever necessary with in-text citations and mentioned among the references. A summary of use needs to be included at the end of the paper, and the outputs should also be included as a supplementary file hosted in GigaDB or other open repositories. Authors should not list AI-writing tools and other AI-assisted technologies as an author or co-author. All authors should acknowledge that they are fully responsible for text generated or refined by AI-writing tools. AI-usage for coding should also be declared. For more see our Editorial Policy and Information for Author pages.
In rare cases it may be necessary for GigaByte to publish corrections to, or retractions of, articles published, so as to maintain the integrity of the academic record. Changes to published articles that affect the interpretation and conclusion of the article, but do not fully invalidate the article, will, at the Editor(s)’ discretion, be corrected via publication of an Erratum that is indexed and linked to the original article. If the scientific information in an article is substantially undermined, it may then be necessary for published articles to be retracted. GigaByte is a member of COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) and will follow the COPE guidelines in such cases, and you can see more information on this and our policies on misconduct and complaints on our Editorial Policies page.
GigaByte is published by GigaScience Press, the open access publishing arm of BGI (a genomics research organisation based in Shenzhen, China). GigaScience Press is part of BGI Research, the non-profit arm of BGI, and we are currently registered and hosted in their offices in Hong Kong. The GigaByte team are employed by BGI, but have strict Editorial independence and a transparent Editorial and peer-review processes to make that clear.