Open access publisher BioMed Central, UK, and BGI, one of the world’s largest genomics institutes, have announced the launch of GigaScience, a new open access, open data journal with a scope that embraces all life science research that generates ‘big data’. Together GigaScience and its integrated database GigaDB provide scientific analyses, full dataset hosting, and access to the software tools used to conduct these analyses, along with publication of more traditional scientific articles describing the studies. To see this and other Open Access journals click here to access BioMed Central.