General information

Database: GigaDB

GigaDB is a data repository supporting scientific publications in the Life/Biomedical Sciences domain. GigaDB organises and curates data from individually publishable units into datasets, which are provided openly and in as FAIR manner as possible for the global research community. Originally GigaDB primarily served as a repository to host data and tools associated with articles in GigaScience; however, it is now accepting datasets that are not associated with GigaScience articles (see GigaDB Submission Criteria below). GigaDB defines a dataset as a group of files (e.g., sequencing data, analyses, imaging files, software programs) that are related to and support an article or study. Through our association with DataCite, each dataset in GigaDB will be assigned a DOI that can be used as a standard citation for future use of these data in other articles by the authors and other researchers. Datasets in GigaDB all require a title that is specific to the dataset, an author list, and an abstract that provides information specific to the data included within the set. We encourage detailed information about the data we host to be submitted by their creators in ISA-Tab, a format used by the BioSharing and ISA Commons communities that we work with to maintain the highest data and metadata standards in our journal. To maximize its utility to the research community, all datasets in GigaDB are placed under a CC0 waiver (for more information on the issues surrounding CC0 and data see Hrynaszkiewicz and Cockerill, 2012).

---

GigaDB Submission Criteria

GigaDB has also been accepting submission of datasets associated with Open Access publications, and is currently working to scale this out with other publishers. As with all current datasets in GigaDB the authors will be required to make the data available under a CC0 license (except where ethically inappropriate, e.g. personal data). In order to complete the dataset review and curation process GigaDB staff will require full access to the pre-publication manuscript. Authors and other journals interested in this option should contact the GigaScience team via database@gigasciencejournal.com.

---

Journal: GigaScience

GigaScience is an online, open-access journal that includes, as part of its publishing activities, the database GigaDB. GigaScience is co-published in collaboration between BGI and Oxford University Press, to meet the needs of a new generation of biological and biomedical research as it enters the era of “big-data.” The journal’s scope covers studies from the entire spectrum of the life sciences that produce and use large-scale data as the center of their work. Data from these articles are hosted in GigaDB, from where they can be cited to provide a direct link between the study and the data supporting it, as well as access to relevant tools for reproducing or reusing these data. The journal also publishes commentaries and reviews to provide a forum for discussions surrounding best practices and issues in handling large-scale data. See http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/ for additional information about the journal and prospective article submission.

---

Indexing

GigaDB has been included in several external indexing systems including Google Dataset Search (via schema.org markup), the DataCite search engine, NCBI DataMed, the Data Citation Index (DCI), and Repositive to aid data discovery. GigaDB pushes dataset metadata to DataCite every time a DOI is minted, this is exposed and accessible via their metadata store through the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The records for the datasets, which include authors, institutions, keywords, citations and other metadata, are connected to related peer-reviewed literature indexed in their Web of Knowledge database. In addition, GigaDB is listed in FAIRsharing, Re3Data.org and other database catalogues to ensure we reach as wide an audience as possible.