Dozens of board members resign from big-data journal after mass staff firings

More than three-fifths of the editorial board of a biomedical sciences journal resigned after the publication’s operations moved from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, China, and the editors and software team were fired with 30 days’ notice. 

GigaScience is published in partnership between Oxford University Press and GigaScience Press, the publishing division of BGI, a genomics company based in Shenzhen, according to their website. 

On October 29, B.F. Francis Ouellette, a bioinformatics consultant, sent the resignation notice in an email addressed to Oxford University Press and the new editor-in-chief of the journal, Xun Xu. According to the email, which was signed by 30 of the journal’s 49 board members, those resigning became “increasingly concerned about the recent structural and editorial changes at GigaScience and how they may affect the journal’s long-standing commitment to publishing rigorously reviewed, reproducible research.”

Those changes include a move from the long-standing Hong Kong-based editorial and data teams to Shenzhen, Ouellette wrote. The changes were made “without prior consultation or communication” with the editorial board, he added. 

Within an hour of the email, the signed names were removed from the editorial board page on the journal’s website. Xu, the executive editor and the three listed editors are all based in Shenzhen and are all affiliated with BGI. Xu is the chief scientist for BGI Group. 

The journal publishes “big data” research in the life and biomedical sciences. In recent coverage, the Open Bioinformatics Foundation said the journal was the “equivalent to establishing a full-fledged data center.” And in September, GigaScience won a Crossref metadata award.

Hongling Zhou, the newly appointed executive editor at GigaScience, said the journal was “now in the process of reconstituting” the editorial board. 

Ouellette said his primary concern wasn’t the move to Shenzhen, but that the former editors were fired with 30 days notice. 

Among those let go was the journal’s founding editor-in-chief, Scott Edmunds, who was with GigaScience for nearly 15 years. He gave a history of the journal and his time there in a blog post published September 17, his last day at the journal. 

Edmunds told us he received “generic and vague” messages from the human resources department at BGI, informing him the move was “due to strategic planning and operational optimization.”

Edmunds also said he feels optimistic about the future of the journal, noting the former editors “trained the Shenzhen team well.”

The journal is the latest to join our Mass Resignations List, which documents walkouts and resignations at more than two dozen journals since 2023.

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