BGI was founded in 1999 with the vision of using genomics to benefit mankind and has since become the largest genomic organization in the world. With a focus on research and applications in the fields of healthcare, agriculture, conservation and environment, BGI has a proven track record of innovative and high profile research, which has generated over 1,500 publications, many in top-tier journals such as Nature and Science.

BGI’s distinguished achievements have made a significant contribution to the development of genomics throughout the world. BGI’s goal is to make state-of-the-art genomics highly accessible to the global research community and clinical markets by integrating the industry’s broadest array of leading technologies, including BGI's own BGISEQ sequencing platform, economies of scale, and expert bioinformatics resources.

The China National GeneBank (CNGB) has built an integrated infrastructure of ‘Three banks’ and ‘Two platforms.’ ‘Three Banks’ represents Biorepository, Bio-informatics Data Center and Living Biobank, while ‘Two Platforms’ includes Digitalization Platform and Synthesis and Editing Platform.

Based on the system of ‘Store, Read, and Write’ with profound genomics resource, CNGB establishes a public welfare, open, supportive and leading platform as well as principles and guidelines to enable exchange and share of data and genetic resource with the major databases such as NCBI, EMBL-EBI and DDBJ, and with biobanks including the Svalbard Seed Vault, Heidelberg University, Smithsonian Institute, etc., to build a global network system, which facilitates genetic resource exploration and industrial transformation of omics knowledge in the area of personalized medicine, agricultural breeding, marine development and microbial application, etc., innovates new technologies, products and models, helps curing diseases, leads a healthy life and achieves the mission of ‘Genomic resources are owned by all, completed by all and shared by all.’

GigaScience is an online journal platform with open access, open data and open peer-review. Our focus covers big data research from Life and Biomedical sciences, including the growing range of work that uses difficult-to-access large-scale data, such as imaging, neuroscience, ecology, cohort, systems biology, and other new types of sharable data.

We are unique in the publishing industry as we publish ALL research objects (data, software tools, and workflows) and do this within the context of a variety of article types, including Research, Data Notes, Technical Notes, Reviews and Commentaries. Our goal is to revolutionize publishing by improving research reproducibility as well as data dissemination, organization, understanding and re-use.

To achieve our goals, the journal has a novel publication format: one that links standard manuscript publication with an extensive database that hosts all associated data, provides data analysis tools and cloud-computing resources. Coupled with this, we have also built a Galaxy-based data analysis platform to host computational methods and workflows, maximizing use of the data, tools and workflows in our articles in a more accessible and reproducible environment.