George Garrity, Michigan State University Standards in Genomic Sciences (SIGS) is a new Open Access publication that is being created in cooperation with the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC). It is in tended to fill an unmet need for rapid publication of standards compliant reports on genomes and metagenomes, standard operating procedures relevant to large-scale sequencing initiatives, and various forms of technical reports, policy statements, meeting reports and other con tent that is pertinent to this rapidly evolving field. In keeping with the spirit of Open Access electronic-only publications, SIGS will be distributed to readers at no cost, with publication costs initially being absorbed through grants from the Michigan State University Foundation and the US Department of Energy. Where the GSC and other standards initiatives have sought to develop interoperable approaches to ensure consistency in semantic and syntactic annotation of genomes and metagenomes, SIGS will apply and extend these standards to published content so as to more tightly integrate the literature with the underlying data. SIGS will also provide a vehicle for rapidly publishing concise, highly structured reports of sequenced genomes and metagenomes so that readers can readily make comparisons across time and taxa in a single place that tightly integrates with past, present and future knowledge existing elsewhere in the literature. The purpose of this presentation will be to update the com munity on progress in launching the journal and to solicit feedback.
« Hide
