GigaScience Press would like to congratulate Victoire Nsabatien for winning a 2024 Ben Barres Spotlight Award for his two preprints publicly reviewed and published by GigaByte. Prizes are a good way of positively reinforcing and incentivizing good practice in opening up science, and eLife should be commended creating the Ben Barres Spotlight Award for groups that are underrepresented in biology and medicine. eLife also need to be thanked for supporting the Sciety platform that allows preprint-review integration with GigaByte and GigaScience Journals, as the award incentivises groups active on the Sciety platform, and made this work eligible for the award. GigaByte Journal has integrated a novel ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ (PRC) peer-review model, in partnership with eLife. Using eLife’s Sciety platform GigaByte offers a highlighted editor’s assessment of each reviewed preprint, helping readers gauge the interest and importance of the work, while also throwing light on the review and assessment process of research.
Ben Barres Award winning entry sharing crucial malaria vector data from the Democratic Republic of Congo to the GBIF repository.
Victoire provided two submissions to our Vectors of Human Disease series describing and sharing data in the GBIF repository from Anopheles malaria and Arbovirus carrying Aedes mosquitoes from different districts of Kinshasa. As GigaByte mandates preprints and integrates with Sciety, you can see the winning entries publicly reviewed and evaluated here:
https://sciety.org/articles/activity/10.46471/gigabyte.96
https://sciety.org/articles/activity/10.46471/gigabyte.104
Victoire will use this $5000 award to purchase laboratory equipment and research consumables for testing low-cost plant-based larvicides for mosquito control in the DRC, saying, “I’m proud to receive this prestigious award. Malaria is a major public health burden in my country, and this grant will greatly enhance my research into potential new tools to control malaria mosquitoes.” You can see a video of Victoire celebrating the award on our youtube channel.
On top of scientometric work demonstrating directly to authors the citations and credit they will receive upon making their supporting data, another way to promote open data sharing is through prizes, including the BMC Open Data award that our Assemblathon2 paper won in 2014. We also have a soft spot for innovation awards, GigaScience winning the AAP PROSE Award for Innovation in Publishing in 2018 and GigaByte winning the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing in 2022. Promoting more transparent peer review and reducing barriers, we also see this Ben Barres award as recognition for our efforts to better address the four key pillars of Open Science highlighted by UNESCO. If you have further work for the vectors in human disease series (which is still open), or also want to try out our more transparent and equitable modes of peer review please get in touch.
Victoire Nsabatien et al., Data from Entomological Collections of Aedes (Diptera: Culicidae) in a post-epidemic area of Chikungunya, City of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gigabyte, 2023 https://doi.org/10.46471/gigabyte.96
Zanga J at al. Species composition and distribution of the Anopheles gambiae complex circulating in Kinshasa, Gigabyte, 2024 https://doi.org/10.46471/gigabyte.104
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