Open Access

Open Access Article Processing Charges Author Self Archiving Policies

All content published in GigaByte is made freely available online under an Open Access model. Copyright is retained by the author(s), who also may grant any third party the right to use the article freely as long as its integrity is maintained and its original authors, citation details and publisher are identified (with exceptions, as stated below where authors cannot hold copyright due to funding obligations).

Additionally, to promote full transparency, the published article will be accompanied by the reviewers’ comments, author and editor correspondence, and any other material that is part of the submission and assessment process that the editors deem suitable.

GigaByte uses the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license as standard, which formalizes these and other terms and conditions of publishing articles. All textual content associated with the journal, including our open peer-reviews, documentation, author and editor correspondence, and blog articles covering our work, also are published under this standard CC BY 4.0.  

GigaScience Press is a member of OASPA (the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association) who promote best practice and ethical standards in open access. Applying rigorous criteria and in-depth review to membership and actively collaborate on important standard-raising scholarly communication initiatives.

To meet funder Open Access mandates our content is automatically deposited and mirrored in PubMed Central (PMC). 

Our Open Access Policy goes beyond thinking about our human readers, to assisting machine readability and automated analysis of text and data (i.e. text and data mining or TDM). We strongly support the stance that the right to read is the right to mine. GigaByte articles may be mined, reused, and shared by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose. To aid these efforts we open up our complete content stores to TDM efforts by providing download access for our complete Open Access corpus, accessible via this page.

Where an author is prevented from being the copyright holder (for instance in the case of US government employees or those of Commonwealth governments), minor variations may be required. In such cases the copyright line and license statement in individual articles will be adjusted, for example to state ‘© 2020 Crown copyright’. For those of you who are US government employees or are prevented from being copyright holders for similar reasons, GigaByte can accommodate non-standard copyright lines. Please contact us at editorial@gigabytejournal.com if further information is needed. 

In addition to our copyright policy, we also follow a strict Open Data Policy, and the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication waiver applies to all published data in this journal. All associated published software needs to be under an Open Source Initiative approved license where practicable compiled running software is made available. For more on why we follow these policies, please see Creative Commons for more information on their licenses.

Prior to publication, and in the interest of promoting rapid “open science” mechanisms for disseminating research, GigaByte endorses and strongly encourages authors to present their findings and data to their peers in any legal format. This includes, but is not limited to presenting at meetings and conferences; placing the work in open-access repositories; posting on their website; presenting in blog form and discussing their findings on social media, wikis and electronic lab notebooks. Pre-publication material should include notice that it has not been peer-reviewed. As long as it is clear is and isn’t peer-reviewed, and copyright and attribution norms are followed, none of these activities will affect consideration of a manuscript by GigaByte.

Specifically, we feel that authors should control the release of information on their own work prior to publication. We are firmly against anything, such as the Ingelfinger Rule, that discourages discussion of manuscripts ahead of formal publication, hinders scientific discourse, and slows the pace of discovery.

Article Processing Charges

Open Access Article Processing Charges Author Self Archiving Policies

All articles published in GigaByte are open access and freely available online, immediately upon publication. This is made possible by an article-processing charge (APC) that covers the many services we provide in promoting reproducible, data-centric research dissemination.

Given the current extremely high cost of publishing in the majority of open access journals, we have been looking toward ways to keep our APCs as low as possible. Our aim is only to cover our costs: not to take advantage of grant funds that are aimed at promoting research, and not to make profit by any business or investor.

From 1 October 2021 we have been implementing APCs that match this goal, with prices that will be affordable and transparent, and also integrated into the new Open Access Switchboard to allow seamless reporting and payments from institutions and funders with centralised Open Access funds. On top of waivers to prevent access to publication being a barrier to those without such funding (please contact us is you require assistance). Taking a 10% margin on top of our groundbreakingly cost effective publishing workflow to cover future development of the journal, for submissions our current APC is $485 USD.

Being based in Hong Kong there is no sales tax or VAT added to this price, and we can take payments by bank transfer or credit card (with a credit card transaction fee).

Publication will include curation and hosting of 1TB of data in our GigaDB repository, (In cases where more space is required, please contact the editors at editorial@gigabytejournal.com if you require more).

Third-party content in Open Access papers

GigaByte articles cannot include material for which you do not have Open Access re-use permissions. For permission to reuse such material, please contact the rights holder.

Author self-archiving policies

Open Access Article Processing Charges Author Self Archiving Policies

As noted above, we promote the use of preprint servers as this reduces the delay between discovery and dissemination of results, and we strongly recommend the use of community preprint servers, such as arXiv, bioRxiv, MedRxiv, and OSF Preprints. We also encourage the citation of preprints where appropriate in the reference list of submitted manuscripts.

If you have additional queries, please contact editorial@gigabytejournal.com.