Here we describe how members of the chicken research community have come together as the “Avian RNAseq Consortium” to provide chicken RNAseq data with a view to improving the annotation of the chicken genome. The data was used by Ensembl in their release 71 gene_build to help provide the most up-to-date annotation of Galgal4, which is still in current use. The data has also been used to predict many ncRNAs, particularly lncRNAs, and it continues to be used as a resource for annotation of other avian genomes along with continued gene discovery in the chicken. This article is submitted as part of the Third Report on Chicken Genes and Chromosomes which will be published in Cytogenetic and Genome Research.