2015 Benjamin Franklin Award Finalists Announced, Voting Open
February 12, 2015 | The 2015 Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences is now open for voting by Bioinformatics.org winners. The winner will be announced in April at the Bio-IT World Conference and Expo.
The Benjamin Franklin Award is a humanitarian/bioethics award presented annually by Bioinformatis.org to an individual who has, in his or her practice, promoted free and open access to the materials and methods used in the life sciences. This year’s finalists include the founder of the Encyclopedia of Life; the founder of BioRuby; the past president of the International Society for Computational Biology; and leader of the Human Metabolome Project.
Bioinformatics.org members can vote at http://www.bioinformatics.org/franklin/ until Feb. 23.
Finalists for 2015 are:
James L. Edwards, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
James Edwards was the founding Executive Director of two global initiatives that continue to make biodiversity information freely accessible across national boundaries on the web: The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the global effort to digitize and disseminate the published literature on biodiversity that is not constrained by copyright, is a major spin-off from EOL. These three platforms have had extraordinary multiplier effects, leading to the development of data standards and systems that have generated widespread data sharing and interchange. GBIF now serves data on more than 525 species occurrences reported on nearly 1.5 million species from almost 14,000 datasets. EOL provides 1.35 million web pages, each devoted to one species, with nearly 3 million specimen images. BHL now provides online access to more than 45 million pages from more than 150,000 volumes published in more than 90,000 journals.
James' vision of free and open access to biodiversity information has had a transformative effect on the institutions that maintain collections and their databases and biodiversity information in all its forms. This is changing the way we study biodiversity and its causes and conservation.
Toshiaki Katayama, Database Center for Life Science, Tokyo, Japan
Toshiaki Katayama is the founder of the BioRuby project, an open source initiative which is officially part of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation and was established more than 10 years ago. BioRuby is a widely used library for bioinformatics software development and it has been adopted worldwide in major research centres and institutes in Japan, USA, EU and Australia. The BioRuby project, as the BioPerl, BioPython and BioJava projects, was a major driver for the development and the growth of the bioinformatics as a modern discipline.
Alongside his commitment in the development of the BioRuby Open Source project, Toshiaki is the principal organiser of the BioHackathon series, a major event in the bioinformatics world. The event is focused on standardization and interoperability of bioinformatics data and web services for improving integration and usability of databases in life sciences. The focus of the BioHackathon is also on establishing an open and international community of people, who can interact and work together to improve the development and the achievements of the bioinformatics field.
Burkhard Rost, Technical University of Munich, Germany
Burkhard Rost has been dedicated to making tools developed by his lab available online, as demonstrated through the first internet server for protein structure prediction and sequence analysis PredictProtein, which was launched in 1992, and has been continuously in service since.
Burkhard's research has focused on combining machine learning approaches with evolutionary information to predict various aspects of protein structure and function. For example, during his Ph.D. he developed PHD, a widely used program to predict secondary structure elements from sequence. More recently, Burkhard's lab has been focusing on developing methods predicting the functional and structural consequences of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) -- these methods are publicly available and highly cited.
Burkhard has also demonstrated an unusually high productivity in service to the scientific community, building a more global and open community.
Burkhard was the President of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) from 2007 to 2014. During his service in ISCB, Burkhard has constantly advocated for free, open, public, online access by person or machine to both published and unpublished data.
Owen White, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD
Owen White has been a leading proponent of open access software since the late 1990's, when he worked as the Director of Bioinformatics at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). At TIGR and in the years since then, he has consistently advocated for the free release of software and of genome sequence data. He led the development of the Comprehensive Microbial Resource (first published in 2001), one of the first and at the time one of the largest open databases of bacterial genome annotation. As a PI of the NIH Human Microbiome Project (HMP) Data Analysis and Coordination Center, Owen has advocated that all data be open access. In recent years his group has developed several influential open-source software systems for genome annotation, including Manatee, Ergatis, and the IGS Prokaryotic Annotation Engine.
David S. Wishart, University of Alberta, Canada
David Wishart has been actively developing and promoting open access databases and webservers since 1998. David led the Human Metabolome Project (HMP), and his group has created and currently maintains more than 60 different open-access bioinformatics resources covering areas such as metabolomics, structural biology, biomolecular NMR, drug discovery, toxicology, metagenomics, pathway analysis and microbiology.
A number of these resources have played a key role in the evolution of bioinformatics and the integration of small-molecule chemistry with big-molecule biology. From 2002-2011, David also operated Canada's national Bioinformatics Helpdesk and produced the Canadian Bioinformatics Newsletter. Both services had a global reach (4000 users, >20 countries) and both were dedicated to develop and promote the sharing of open source and open access bioinformatics software. David also helped found the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops in 1999.
This educational program has not only taught thousands of students and professionals about bioinformatics but it has also actively promoted the open access/open source movement through its course offerings.
