A Decade of GigaScience: GigaDB and the Open Data Movement

Area of Science:

• * Data Science and Digital Curation
• * Scholarly Publishing and Open Data Archiving

Background:

• * The rise of multidisciplinary research demands robust Open Data repositories to support scientific publications.
• * GigaDB, established before GigaScience journal's launch in 2012, has served as a key data archive for over a decade.
• * Consistent growth in data volume, discoverability, and re-use characterizes the GigaDB resource.

Purpose of the Study:

• * To provide a retrospective analysis of GigaDB's evolution over the past decade.
• * To highlight the critical role of Data Curation in improving user experience.
• * To explore methods for enabling researchers to interact with and explore datasets before downloading.

Main Methods:

• * Retrospective analysis of GigaDB's development and usage metrics.
• * Review of data curation strategies and their impact on data accessibility.
• * Exploration of interactive data exploration tools and pre-download features.

Main Results:

• * Significant expansion of GigaDB's data volume and user engagement over 11 years.
• * Demonstrated improvement in data discoverability and re-use rates.
• * Positive impact of enhanced data curation on user experience and data accessibility.

Conclusions:

• * Open Data repositories like GigaDB are essential for modern, multidisciplinary scientific research.
• * Effective data curation is crucial for maximizing the value and usability of archived data.
• * Interactive tools for pre-download data exploration are needed to further facilitate data re-use and understanding.