Beyond the Version of Record: Bringing Publications to Life

The coronavirus pandemic has underlined the importance of open, rapid dissemination of research; as well as increasing trust by making research output easier to access, interact with, and understand. GigaScience Press has partnered with River Valley Technologies to launch a new platform and publishing workflow that aims to address these issues using custom-built, end-to-end publishing technology. The system enables accepted manuscripts to be converted to online, PDF-ready articles within a day. The new journal, GigaByte, streamlines editorial effort by focusing on short-format data and software-centric articles. The publication process integrates with the GigaScience Database (GigaDB , RRID:SCR_004002) that serves as a broad-spectrum repository, displaying data and code snapshots associated with these publications. Curators are on hand to help host supporting data, curate metadata as well as visualisations of the resultant data. By integrating visualisations and interactive content within the article, GigaByte transforms the article from the traditional static, descriptive journal article. Aiding the sharing of the outputs of data science research, by building upon the open code and integrating a reproducibility toolkit of third-party tools to showcase interactive and executable versions of the results. As well as providing the opportunity to more easily test code and provide certificates of executable computation. The presentation of this poster will offer a live demo showcasing examples of how this interactivity can be built upon the data, software and results. Bringing publications to life in this manner allows a rethink of the concept of “Version of Record” to focus more on archiving the underlying data, software, PIDs and factual entities, and away from the traditional unchanging proofed document that is mostly superfluous packaging.