Despite health problems James Watson filmed a video 2yrs ago for the BGI ICG meeting (which they just showed again at #ICG20) where he was still looking forward to solving difficult problems. Even then he couldn't help go off script to talk about girls and tease Crick's failure in neuroscience #RIP

Thank you Francis for all you've done for the journal. We put in a lot of effort to build up an excellent and very experienced Ed Board, and seeing so many of them resigning in this manner is sad but shows they've taken their responsibilities seriously.

Got a pretty good view of the Wat Nang Chi “Pulling of the Buddha’s relic” procession on the Khlong Dan canal this morning

Enjoying the DataCite-OpenAlex webinar right now. Interesting seeing the heavy use of the API from places like India

New post wearing my @citsciasia.bsky.social (and Burmaphile) hat: Organising the First Ever @inaturalist.bsky.social Bioblitz in Myanmar: The Jacana Project Art + Science Exhibition scedmunds.substack.com/p/organising... #citizenscience

Zohran picked 「卓蘭」("excellent orchid") for his first name and「夸梅」("brilliant plum") for his middle name. The orchid and the plum are among "The Four Noble Ones" in traditional Chinese art, the former symbolizing an indifference to fame and fortune, the latter an indomitable, incorruptible spirit.

I’m in Bangkok this weekend but remotely helping to organize what I think is the first ever iNat bioblitz in Myanmar

Sam Sen Nai Philatelic Museum really going all in for their Halloween “You’ve Ghost mail” weekend

Robots seeing you off at Hangzhou airport. Including unmanned ice-cream dispensing freezers #ICG20

Harris Lewin giving us a big overview of the Earth Genome Project at #ICG20

#ICG20 moves to the impressive Zhejiang Lab today, an incredible campus that is home to China’s non-profit AI research institute

Interesting already 1/3 of the data access requests for MCPS are coming from researchers in China. After the reception this talk is getting sure it will go higher… #ICG20

Packed auditorium at #ICG20 for Rory Collins giving his CEO level view of the UK Biobank

Packed auditorium at #ICG20 for Rory Collins giving his CEO level view of the UK Biobank

Mathias Uhlen doing a talk on the Human Proton Atlas, but being in Hangzhou this will have an AI-based precision medicine angle #ICG20

Francis Crawley up now at #ICG20 talking event data visitation. In a world where data sovereignty is being asserted more, this seems to be a “new architecture” to keep applying the “done by all, shared by all, and owned by all” vision of BGI

Refreshing AI talk from Wang Jian from the Zhejiang AI lab. None of that Silicon Valley AGI spin, “AI intelligence is completely different to human intelligence”. Looking back to Turing and Simon, and Hinton’s background as a cognitive psychologist #ICG20

Opening of #ICG20 in Hangzhou, and Huanming Yang opening things with an apology (we’ve run out of seats). And thanking all his teachers. Already setting the tone for a meeting of bittersweet nostalgia.

Hello Ali-Town. Just arrived in Hangzhou for #ICG20

Bangkok Science Nerds, I'm doing a talk on Bauhinia Genome on 30th October at Bangkok Scientifique. Sign up here www.meetup.com/bkksci/event...

Rama III building a temple looking like a Chinese junk to try to stem declining Chinese maritime trade seem topical again in our current geopolitical and economic climate. Totally bonkers temple though

As International Data Week has just finished, if you didn't make it to Brisbane here is a brief write-up of my highlights and what I thought were some of the main themes this year open.substack.com/pub/scedmund... #IDW2025

Awesome, next International Data Week in 2027 is going to be in Cape Town. Second time the meeting will be hosted in Southern Africa, and IDW2018 in Botswana was amazing. It's the closing session for #IDW2025 so hope to be there in person for #IDW2027

Nice getting an update on FAIRsharing from Susanna Sansone at #IDW2025. Great to see growing 3rd party integrations of this service, including the ELIXIR Data Stewardship Wizard. We've been using this in DOME ML annotation and peer review

Samuel Spencer presenting at #IDW2025 on the MAST Methodology and the IDEAL Metadata Framework working to measure organisational data maturity aristotlemetadata.com/about/mast-m...

Watching along to @danielskatz.org presenting an update on the RDA FAIR for Machine Learning (FAIR4ML) IG. The focus today being FAIR for ML models: seeing how FAIR principles fit with the ML lifecycle at #DW2025 www.rd-alliance.org/groups/fair-...

"There is no such thing as sauciety." —Margaret Thatcher, probably #ASHG25

Mind-blowing talk from Lynn Woolfrey in the #IDW2025 "Rigorous, responsible and reproducible science in the era of FAIR data and AI" session on how DataFirst's expertise in data rescue projects in Africa has lead to it stepping in to rescue data from US government funded education projects

You can read the associated preprint covering this topic in more detail here doi.org/10.31222/osf... #IDW2025

Interesting research lifecycle model for Agentic AI in the RDA Plenary Session of #IDW2025, Microsoft working with RDA and are asking for input on roles and where to prioritize development of AI agents in research

Nice there’s another ML standards case study in this #IDW2025 “long-tail of supplemental data” session, Slava Tykhonov presenting on Croissant ML docs.google.com/presentation...

Have the video of case-study on standards and tools for publishing ML research I've just presented in the #IDW2025 "Bridging the FAIR gap" track available here youtu.be/O0GuaHiOl8c?...

Will be presenting a case-study in the #IDW2025 "Bridging the FAIR gap: transforming the long tail of supplementary data & generalist repositories into FAIR datasets" session currently underway in M3. Starting with setting on the challenges of supplemental files scidatacon.org/event/9/cont...

Watching the #IDW2025 GREI "Stronger together: Advancing the data repository ecosystem through strategic coopetition" track online, and very disappointed I couldn't participate in person in the end (I was supposed to present a case study for Dryad) scidatacon.org/event/9/cont...

Interesting #IDW2025 talk from Jennifer Gu from HKUST Library studying Data Availability Statements in their institutions papers. Interesting they see a clearer citation advantage having a DAS than #OA compliance

Just seen the SCMP journalist who attended our @cassyni.bsky.social webinar last month just published on it www.scmp.com/news/china/s... This is a great use case for Cassyni, as both times we promoted linked webinars in Press Releases we got journalists attending and writing articles on the papers

ICYMI: GigaScience Press is showing how strong metadata boosts transparency and impact. Their practices make research easier to index, track, and reuse. https://doi.org/10.64000/z2qhj-7nd90?mtm_campaign=blog%20post&mtm_source=BS&mtm_medium=social

Help Tackle the Asian Biodiversity Data Gap with Asia Nature Challenge medium.com/citizenscien... #AsiaNatureChallenge #ANC2025

First day of #AsiaNatureChallenge, and my highlight has to be the giant water monitors sunning themselves in Lumpini park www.inaturalist.org/observations... #ANC2025

Thank you OBF (and especially Taz) for this lovely post about the GigaScience team. I've been going to your #BOSC meetings since 2011 and will miss catching up with you all each summer, but hopefully it's not goodbye!

Only just noticed @crossref.bsky.social posted their interview with me talking about winning one of the inaugural Crossref Metadata awards was finally published on my last day of work. It's always good to end on a high! www.crossref.org/blog/raising...

A Chinese *food delivery* company produced an apparently high performance open weight LLM. Can someone remind me what OpenAI’s moat is again? There is apparently no exotic special sauce required to do this.

“If knowledge is power, then openness is resistance”. Just found out @carolegoble.bsky.social dropped this at Dagstuhl. Thank you Carole, this means a lot!

And it’s goodbye from me. Final GigaBlog from outgoing EiC @scedmunds.bsky.social on the major changes at GigaScience Press gigasciencejournal.com/blog/and-its...

From me, @mhmdhsini.bsky.social, and @scedmunds.bsky.social Code Plagiarism and AI Create New Challenges for Publishing Integrity

#code_plagiarism is REAL & #AI is negatively affecting the #integrity of code/software. Dan Katz, @scedmunds.bsky.social & I discuss involved issues & their impacts on #research_integrity & #publication_ethics in a @scholarlykitchen.bsky.social post: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/08/28/g...

Thanks Herve Menager for showing me around the Pasteur Institute. It felt appropriate visiting the Yersin Building, as Alexandre Yersin (of Yersinia pestis fame) made his big breakthrough in Hong Kong. And I’ve long admired his statue in the HKMMS

A few shots of the #BOSC2025 panelists discussing their thoughts on data sustainability. Panelists were @scedmunds.bsky.social, @cmungall.bsky.social, @varsha-khodiyar.bsky.social, Tony Burdett, and Nicky Mulder; the moderator was @monimunozto.bsky.social

During the #BOSC2025 panel on Data Sustainability, @scedmunds.bsky.social shared his perspective from the world of open scientific publishing while moderator @monimunozto.bsky.social listened attentively.

Don't miss the Data Sustainability panel at #BOSC2025: www.open-bio.org/events/bosc-... with ‪@cmungall.bsky.social‬, ‪@varsha-khodiyar.bsky.social‬, Nicky Mulder, Tony Burdett, @scedmunds.bsky.social, and moderator @monimunozto.bsky.social What would you ask these data sustainability experts?