Round three for GigaByte’s vectors of human disease series

TDR, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases hosted at the World Health Organization (WHO), GBIF and GigaScience Press have announced a third call for authors to submit Data Release papers on vectors of human disease for inclusion in a thematic series published in GigaByte Journal.

Round three builds on the first two phases of the series, which mobilized more than 700,000 occurrence records and 890,000 specimens from more than 70 countries. Watch the 25 January 2022 and the 30 March 2023 webinars to learn more about data papers in general, and see a new video on the features of the series.

Vector-borne diseases account for about one quarter of all infectious diseases. Although there has been significant progress for malaria, with a recent decrease in malaria morbidity and mortality rates, this progress is currently halting. Other diseases, such as those caused by arboviruses like dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever and more recently Zika, are expanding, with an increased number of cases and fatalities.

For an outline of the initial results of this targeted approach to sharing data and its importance for controlling vector-borne diseases and improving public health see the Editorial in GigaByte by the GBIF health task group. With the input of the Editorial team and authors we also published an umbrella paper in GigaScience, surveying and getting insight from the authors on this first phase of submissions.

The necessity for developing new vector control strategies, approaches and tools was recognized through the Global Vector Control Response approved by the World Health Assembly in 2017. Among the mutually agreed objectives between GBIF and TDR is to work on a repository of data related to vectors and support design and identification of sources and contacts for data mobilization campaigns to improve data coverage to help research on human health. Within the framework of this collaboration, GigaByte is pleased to support a second issue on data papers on vectors.

As a reminder the data papers submitted should describe datasets with the following criteria:

• Data has clear relevance for research on vectors of human vector-borne diseases
• Dataset contains more than 5,000 records that are new to GBIF.org from 2023 onwards, along with high-quality data and metadata
• Data is dedicated to the public domain under an open CC0 designation

Due to generous support from TDR and the WHO article processing fee will be waived for 10 papers, provided that the publications are accepted and meet the above criteria.

The call for round three of manuscripts will be open until 4 April 2025.

GigaByte’s novel, end-to-end XML publishing platform, means publication can be done in a quicker and more cost-effective manner better designed for these more granular research objects that don’t require such a labour intensive and detailed vehicle for sharing. It also allows additional interactivity and we can work with the authors to embed maps, video and imaging data plugins and other relevant tools for visualizing data and results in the final publications. To further increase accessibility the platform allows multilingual publication and linking to multilingual preprint servers like Scielo Preprints and AfricArXiv. So far we have published multilingual versions of many of these papers in Spanish, French and Portuguese. The process of sharing a publicly reviewed preprint helped our author Victoire Nsabatien  win a Ben Barres Spotlight Award for groups that are underrepresented in biology and medicine. The features showcased in the series so far helped GigaByte become a winner of the 2022 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing.

For questions on the series and if you would like to submit please contact the GigaByte Editors at editorial @gigabytejournal.com or the GBIF health helpdesk at health@gbif.org.

References

Shimabukuro P et al., Bridging Biodiversity and Health: The Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s initiative on open data on vectors of human diseases, GigaByte, 2024 https://doi.org/10.46471/gigabyte.117

Edmunds SC et al. Publishing data to support the fight against human vector-borne diseases. GigaScience. 2022 Nov 3;11:giac114. doi:10.1093/gigascience/giac114

Vectors of human disease series. GigaByte. 2022. https://doi.org/10.46471/GIGABYTE_SERIES_0002

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