Encouraging authors to use and cite data in public repositories; A publisher perspective

The poster to be presented at Biocuration 2025 meeting in Kansas city, USA.

Encouraging authors to use and cite data in public repositories; a publisher perspective.

Chris Hunter1, Bastien Molcrette1, Yannan Fan1, Mary Ann Tuli1

1- GigaDB, GigaScience Press, Hong Kong.

GigaScience Press publishes two journals; GigaScience and GigaByte, both have extremely high standards for transparency and reproducibility. In order to maintain these standards we have a team of data curators (biocurators) whose job is to ensure the manuscripts' are as transparent and reproducible as possible prior to publication.

Whilst we do have GigaDB, our own repository to host data associated with GigaScience Press articles, we try to use that only for data that do not have a natural home in a suitable stable public repository such as the INSDC. GigaDB biocurators act as an interpretation layer between the often-verbose standards of FAIR data, and time-pressured authors, who require succinct and pertinent guidance specific to their
manuscript. We accomplish this by scanning the manuscript prior to peer-review and
instructing the submitting author(s) how to make their data available either privately whilst under peer-review, or directly open. This ensures reviewers can spend their time reviewing the article rather than hunting the data. Collecting the data at this stage ensures that if the manuscript passes peer-review we can proceed straight away with the publication process.

Here we present a summary of the variety of different repositories that our biocurators recommend to authors, and how we ensure those data are suitably cited and linked from the journal articles and, where appropriate, from GigaDB datasets.