Australian open-access evangelist Philip Bourne, a prolific computational biologist at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), has beaten out stiff competition to win the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Award.
The annual award, presented by the Bioinformatics Organization, is given to a scientist who epitomizes the open-source values espoused by the legendary inventor and statesman. Bourne will be presented with his award by Jeff Bizzaro, president of Bioinformatics.org, at the 2009 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston on Tuesday, April 28. ...
Bourne was nominated for his numerous and varied contributions to both open access in bioinformatics and computational biology as well as his innovations with the Protein Data Bank (PDB). A past president of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), Bourne is the founding editor-in-chief of PLoS Computational Biology, one of the open-access journals launched by the Public Library of Science. In just four years, the journal has become the highest impact factor journal in the niche of mathematical and computational biology. Bourne is also a co-founder (with PLoS) of the website SciVee.tv, which allows scientists across many disciplines to upload videos, lectures, presentations and posters. ...
Bourne joins a distinguished group of honorees dating back to 2002. The other five finalists this year were: Warren DeLano (DeLano Scientific), developer of the PyMol molecular viewer application; evolutionary geneticist Jonathan Eisen (UC Davis); Don Gilbert (Indiana University), software/database developer; Heng Li (Welcome Trust Sanger Institute), chief developer of the Maq short-read aligner; and Steven Salzberg (University of Maryland), developer of tools such as MUMmer. ...
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
