Being the largest land predator, the fearsome and enigmatic Polar Bear is seen by many as a powerful symbol to highlight of the threats to the environment through global warming.

Editors: Mark Wass (University of Kent, UK), Iddo Friedberg (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA), Predrag Radivojac (Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA) A key to understanding life at the molecular level is based on accurate protein annotation at the functional level.

Today we have a guest posting from F1000’s Iain Hrynaszkiewicz covering the topic of medical data sharing One of the world’s most influential medical journals recently highlighted data sharing as an important issue to be addressed if we are to improve the quality of reporting of biomedical research.

At GigaScience one of our major goals is to take the scientific publishing beyond dead trees and static PDFs to a more dynamic and interactive process, much like science itself has embraced the Internet to become more networked and data driven.

Researchers release a treasure trove of data on the developing retina, pushing the boundaries of neuroscience publishing by presenting it dynamically and reproducibly. A new paper in GigaScience today demonstrates a major step forward for reproducible research and public data-sharing in the neurosciences with the publication and release of a huge cache of electrophysiology data resources.

Endorsing Data Citation Nicely timed for the Data Citation Principles workshop at the IDCC meeting in San Francisco yesterday, the finalized Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles has just been posted on the Force11 website.

The upcoming 2014 Galaxy Community Conference (GCC2014) has just opened early registration, and following from our series announced at the last meeting we are renewing our call for papers for our special thematic focused series on studies utilizing large-scale datasets and workflows.

Push the button! GigaScience moves toward more interactive articles Research articles are being published with increasingly large and complicated supporting datasets, together with the software code used in analyses of the data.

We want you to use our stuff We get many queries regarding the policies and licenses associated with our content and supporting data, and as our co-publishers BioMed Central have just announced the migration of their licenses (including ours) to the newly released version 4.0 of the creative commons CC-BY attribution license, we thought it would be a good opportunity to clarify our policies in an easier to understand manner than

Visualizations are becoming increasing important to graphically illustrate, understand, and glean insight from the explosion of larger and larger datasets in this supposed era of “big data”. Microbial ecology and the study of the microbiome is revolutionizing how we look at health, microorganism diversity and ecological interactions, but these studies are proving challenging to deal with the ever-expanding numbers of specimens sampled.

Editors: Mark Wass (University of Kent, UK), Iddo Friedberg (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA), Predrag Radivojac (Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA) Last July, GigaScience and the organisers of the Automated Function Prediction special interest group at ISMB announced an upcoming series on Automated Function Prediction.