Ballot is Open For 2018 Benjamin Franklin Award Winner
By Bio-IT World Staff
March 5, 2018 | Bioinformatics.org has announced five finalists for the 2018 Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences, including the first finalist team. Voting is open to Bioinformatics.org members on http://www.bioinformatics.org/franklin/, and will be open until Monday, March 12. The winner will be announced Thursday, May 17 at the 2018 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo.
The award is named for Benjamin Franklin, who, as a scientist, inventor, and statesman, freely and openly shared his ideas and refused to patent his inventions. The founders of Bioinformatics.org believe he embodied the best traits of a scientist, and we seek to honor those who share these virtues.
The Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences is a humanitarian/bioethics award presented annually by Bioinformatics.org to an individual (or team) who has, in his or her practice, promoted free and open access to the materials and methods used in the life sciences.
The 2018 finalists are:
Christine Durinx, Associate Director of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics & Johanna McEntyre, Team Leader for Literature Services at EMBL-EBI
Christine and Johanna have worked for the long-term sustainability of open data resources. They are co-chairs the ELIXIR Data Platform, whose mission includes the promotion of open access as a core principle for publicly funded research. As co-chairs, they work relentlessly on the subject of core data resources, i.e. databases that are of fundamental importance to the life science community. In particular, they have been pioneering science policy activities such as evaluating business models for enhanced financial sustainability of core open databases, developing a set of indicators to measure the impact of open databases, and establishing close collaborations at an international level to reach sustainability of these open resources.
Melissa Haendel, Oregon Health and Science University
Melissa has been a long-standing visionary, advocate, and practitioner of open science in a number of significant ways. Co-founder of the Monarch Initiative, her research focus has been on openly-shared formal knowledge representation and reasoning about complex biomedical phenotypes. She has also served in a number of national and international initiatives on open science, including Vice President Biden's Cancer Moonshot Blue Ribbon Panel, where her experience, passion, and common sense have been essential to the group's recommendations on open data sharing. She serves as external advisor to PLoS on their Data Guidelines Board and on their Open Data Collection, which is aimed at highlighting research articles, guidelines, and commentaries about data sharing, data practices, and data policies from a diverse set of research disciplines. Melissa has also been innovating standards for sharing structured phenotype data openly on the web; her initiative, "Phenopackets: Encapsulating and contextualizing phenotypic data in an open science ecosystem" was a runner-up for the NIH/Wellcome Trust/HHMI Open Science Competition and is now an emerging standard within the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH).
Desmond Higgins, Professor of Bioinformatics at the University College Dublin (UCD) Conway Institute
Des has been working on methods and software for DNA and protein sequence alignment since 1985. While at Trinity College, Dublin, he wrote a series of sequence alignment programs called CLUSTAL. He later co-developed T-Coffee (Tree-based Consistency Objective Function for Alignment Evaluation), and his current research group at the UCD Conway Institute develops new, open source tools for evolutionary biology and the mulitvariate analysis of omics data. He has received more than 100,000 citations since 1990 and has 10 papers with over 1,000 citations each. In 2007, Des was elected to the Royal Irish Academy.
B.F. Francis Ouellette, Ontario Institute of Cancer Research
The themes of Francis's career have been open access and open data, connecting bioinformatics people and resources together, and supporting training and education. He coordinated GenBank, the world's largest open DNA sequence database at the NIH. He was an early supporter of PLOS and is an editor at PLOS Computational Biology Education and an associate editor at Database: The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation. He also supports open data and source through his position on various scientific advisory committees, including Saccharomyces Genome Database, the Galaxy project, GenomeSpace, H3ABioNet, and the NIH Human Microbiome Project. He advocates for bioinformatics training through the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops and Bioinformatics.ca. Francis is also an open access advocate. In 2010 he supported a recommendation to the Canadian government to make all publicly funded research open access. His lab at UBC even had an "Ouellette declaration", that they fully support OA of publicly funded work. He was recently recruited by Genome Quebec as VP of Scientific Affairs for his expertise in bioinformatics and genomics, recognizing his open access credentials.
Frank W. Rockhold, Duke University Medical Center
Frank has shown extraordinary contributions and leadership in enabling open access in the Life Sciences. Throughout his 40+ year career, he has championed the importance of open access to patient-level clinical data, working to move clinical trial protocols and results into the public domain. At the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI), he plays a key role as a leader of the SOAR (Supporting Open Access for Researchers) initiative, a collaborative effort between the DCRI, academia, and private industry to open clinical research data for the benefit of the broader research community. SOAR is unique in two respects, disclosing observational data (as opposed to clinical trials) and engaging the academic community in the broader disclosure and transparency movement. He also served on, and recently chaired, the board of directors of CDISC, the global, open, multidisciplinary, non-profit organization that has established standards to support the acquisition, exchange, submission and archive of clinical research data and metadata. Before joining the DCRI, Frank was a trailblazer in data sharing at GlaxoSmithKline. Starting in 2004, he led a team to launch the GSK clinical trials registry of all protocols and results for all products starting in 2000. Starting in 2013, Frank sponsored GSK's efforts to disclose anonymized individual patient data from all clinical trials. Frank has also been closely involved in an effort to address challenges around interoperable datasets under the sponsorship of Multi-Regional Clinical Trials (MRCT) Center at Harvard, Wellcome Trust and others. This has focused over the past few years on developing a common neutral platform (Vivli) for housing and disclosing of clinical trial data.