GigaScience aims to revolutionize data dissemination, organization, understanding, and use. An online open-access open-data journal, we publish 'big-data' studies from the entire spectrum of life and biomedical sciences. To achieve our goals, the journal has a novel publication format: one that links standard manuscript publication with an extensive database that hosts all associated data and provides data analysis tools and cloud-computing resources. Our scope covers not just 'omic' type data and the fields of high-throughput biology currently serviced by large public repositories, but also the growing range of more difficult-to-access data, such as imaging, neuroscience, ecology, cohort data, systems biology and other new types of large-scale sharable data.