Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, May 09, 2006

A home for OA databases

Neil Canavan, Open Source Bioinformatics, Genomics and Proteomics, undated but apparently May 9, 2006. Excerpt:
"As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously." – Benjamin Franklin

These words, written by an inventor who never took a patent, is the mantra of Jeff Bizzaro, MSc, founder of the Bioinformatics Organization Inc. (BOI), one of the largest organizations in the field of bioinformatics. Launched in 1998, BOI embraced the ideals of the open-source movement to combat if not elitist, working conditions imposed by the cost of scientific progress rendered proprietary. (For this article "open source" is defined as freely available software, data sets, or computing capacity.) "When I got into this field in 1995," says Bizzaro, "software as well as biological data were being patented at an alarming rate. Computational tools could run hundreds of thousands of dollars, requiring institutional licenses that only the better-endowed academic institutions could afford." Out of this frustration and almost a sense of isolation, the idea of shared bioinformatics resources evolved. "I created an environment --an online community where myself and others, those of us who didn't have a local group-- could meet and share information."...BOI offers a permanent home, and administration, in exchange for open access. "Anyone who wants a place for their project, and allows other people to access it --they're welcome here."