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.

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, B. F. Francis Ouellette, a bioinformatics consultant, 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. 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, 2025, his last day at the journal.

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2025/11/03/dozens-of-board-members-resign-from-big-data-journal-after-mass-staff-firings/

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