Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Nominees for 2009 Franklin Award for OA in the life sciences

Bioinformatics.org has announced the nominees for the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences.  From today's announcement:

...The winner will be presented with the award and deliver a lecture at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, on Tuesday, April 28....

The six finalists for the 2009 award are:

Philip E. Bourne (Co-Director, Protein Data Bank, University of California San Diego)—Bourne is the founding Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Computational Biology, and co-director of the Protein Data Bank. He continues to develop widely used software tools including SciVee, a free scientific video delivery site.

Warren DeLano (DeLano Scientific)—DeLano developed the PyMol molecular viewer application. His company aggregates resources for open source software development, efficiently channels those resources to create and share innovative tools, and provides subscription services that maximize utility for end users.

Jonathan Eisen (University of California, Davis)—Eisen writes a phylogenomics blog and he has been instrumental in pushing for the early and open release of genomic and metagenomic datasets, including the JCVI Global Oceans data.

Don Gilbert (Indiana University)—Gilbert developed the READSEQ program, euGenes database, and the Bio-Mirror project. Each project is part of the IUBio Archive of biology software and data, which he established.

Heng Li (Welcome Trust Sanger Institute)—Li was the chief developer of Maq, an open source program mapping short reads to reference sequences, and TreeSoft and TreeFam, open source softwares and a database of phylogenetic trees of animal genes.

Steven Salzberg (University of Maryland)—Salzberg produced several popular open source bioinformatics tools (MUMmer, glimmer, TransTerm, Jigsaw, etc.), and helped start the Influenza Genome Sequencing project.

PS:  See our past posts on Philip Bourne, Jonathan Eisen, Don Gilbert, and Steven Salzberg.  Also note that Jonathan Eisen's brother and PLoS co-founder, Mike Eisen, won the Franklin award in 2002.