River Valley is proud to announce that GigaByte, a journal from its client, GigaScience Press, is a joint winner of the 2022 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Scholarly Publishing. The award was given in recognition of GigaByte’s solutions for addressing the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. River Valley delivered this solution using its end-to-end publishing system from submission and peer review to production and hosting, combined with third party integrations.
Scott Edmunds, Chief Editor of GigaByte, highlighted the role of River Valley Technologies: “XML-first publishing workflows have been talked about for a long time, but it’s gratifying for GigaByte to be acknowledged as the first to demonstrate not only that the system works, but that it has real-world benefits, such as reducing costs and increasing accessibility and interactivity in scientific publishing.
An excellent example of its use is that this system, due to its high speed and low cost, enabled the recent publication of a series on Vectors of Human Disease, sponsored by the World Health Organization.
More than half of the submissions were from Latin America, and our ability to publish these articles in our multilingual format further broke down barriers, allowing Portuguese and Spanish speakers to better comprehend the implications of important work relating to the public health of their communities.”
River Valley’s end-to-end publishing platform drastically reduces the time and cost of publication. The cost savings can be passed on to the researcher, opening the door for many researchers around the world.
GigatByte articles are published within 24 hours of acceptance. While GigaByte articles can still be downloaded as an industry-standard PDF, the article publication focus is on the XML content that links to the research data and the code to all of the dynamic features. As well as improving the readability for machines, the platform allows integrated language support as well as the ability to view the article in a dyslexic-friendly font.
River Valley Director Kaveh Bazargan said: “GigaByte’s openness and their appetite to push the boundaries of publishing has allowed us to deploy our unique XML-first technology to embed complex and interactive objects such as immersive 3D content. Articles can be published within 24 hours of acceptance.”
David Sommer, Chair of the judging panel said: “This year’s winners highlight how our industry is responding to the changing needs of authors and researchers together with the move towards making the scholarly record accessible to a broader audience worldwide.”
Contact: Maryam@rivervalley.io
About GigaScience Press
GigaScience Press is BGI’s Open Access Publishing division, which publishes scientific journals and data. Its publishing projects are carried out with international publishing partners and infrastructure providers, including Oxford University Press and River Valley Technologies. It currently publishes two award-winning data-centric journals: its premier journal GigaScience (launched in 2012), which won the 2018 American Publishers PROSE award for innovation in journal publishing, and its new journal GigaByte (launched 2020), which just won the 2022 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. It also publishes data, software, and other research objects via its GigaDB.org database. To encourage transparent reporting of scientific research and to enable future access and analyses, it is a requirement of manuscript submission to all GigaScience Press journals that all supporting data and source code be made openly available in GigaDB or in a community approved, publicly available repository.
About GigaByte
GigaByte provides a way to rapidly and cost-effectively share research, making the scientific process more inclusive and accessible to the broader community. It uses an exclusively XML-based publishing system that automates the production process and makes it effortless to change views, languages and embed interactive content. Enabling readers to directly interact with the underlying data and software allows immediate use of published research, improves reproducibility, and increases trust. Upon acceptance this system converts manuscripts to online – and PDF-ready articles within hours with minimal human intervention, dramatically reducing production time and cost to provide an equitable solution to publish open science. https://gigabytejournal.com/
Contacts: GigaScience Editor-in-Chief, Scott Edmunds, Scott@gigasciencejournal.com,
About ALPSP
ALPSP is the international trade association which supports and represents not-for-profit organizations that publish scholarly and professional content, and those that work with them. Membership of ALPSP is for the whole organization so all employees can take advantage of the benefits on offer. ALPSP is proud to have nearly 300 member organizations across 30 countries. ALPSP.org