Alive and well at 100

A little over eighteen months ago, the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC), with the support of the Michigan State University Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy launched Standards in Genomic Sciences (SIGS). It was a bold experiment in open access publishing that was undertaken to fill a set of unmet needs within the broad community of genome biologists and bioinformaticians. It sought to create a new publishing niche with a series of novel article types to provide readers with highly structured and standards-compliant reports on genome and metagenome sequencing projects, indepth standard operating procedures for analytical pipelines used in genome and metagenome analyses, and in-depth meeting reports, white-papers and other relevant articles to inform the community of ongoing activities of the GSC and other standards formulating bodies within the life sciences.