Mary Ann Tuli's talk at the International Society of Biocuration meeting : What MODs can learn from Journals – a GigaDB curator’s perspective. Shanghai 9th April 2018

1. What MODs can learn from Journals
– a GigaDB curator’s perspective
Mary Ann Tuli
9th April 2018

2. What is GigaDB
• GigaDB primarily serves as a repository to
host data and tools associated with articles in
GigaScience.
• GigaScience is an open access, open data,
open peer-review journal focusing on ‘big
data’ research from the life and biomedical
sciences.

5. GigaScience
www.gigasciencejournal.com
• Promotes reproducibility
• ALL research objects published (data, software
tools and workflows
• FAIR Principles
– Findable
– Accessible
– Interoperable
– Reusable

7. The Growth of GigaDB
0
100
200
300
400
500
2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
Total Datasets
20 different data
types, of which 60%
represent genomic
data, with software,
transcriptomic &
imaging datasets also
having high numbers.

8. New Developments
• 2 new curators (200% increase in staff!)
– Chris Armit – Data Scientist
• orcid 0000-0002-9952-8141
– Mary Ann Tuli – Data Editor
• orcid 0000-0002-4667-9528
– Join Chris Hunter – Lead Biocurator
• orcid 0000-0002-1335-0881

9. New Developments
• Imaging (Chris Armit)
– 3D model viewer
– CT and MRI images to be interactively explored
(see http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/)

10. Imaging

11. MOD Pathway – carrot model
Pre-publication
Curator
Author
MOD driven
Author driven
MOD driven (pre-pub)
Author driven (minimal curation)

12. Journal Pathway – stick model
GigaDB curator GigaScience Editor
Author

13. What I’ve learnt at GigaDB
• Authors are more invested
– Respond to queries (quickly!)
– Keen to work together
• Time pressures

14. “We need to make authors WANT to
make their data available”
Quote from a journal editor – ISB conference,
Cambridge 2013

15. What can the Biocurator Community
learn
• Better outreach
• Better personal communication
• Streamline submission pipelines
• What’s in it for them?
– Priority processing and availability in database
– Recognition

16. Giga Team
GigaScience won the 2018 Innovation in Journal
Publishing: Multidisciplinary Prose Award.
Editor-in-Chief Executive Editor Editors
Laurie Goodman Scott Edmunds Nicole Nogoy
Hans Zauner
Lead Data Manager Database Manager
Peter Li Si Zhe Xiao
Lead Biocurator Data Editor Data Scientist
Chris Hunter Mary Ann Tuli Chris Armit