BOSTON - The Bioinformatics Organization on Wednesday presented the Tenth Annual Benjamin Franklin Award to Prof. Jonathan A. Eisen of the University of California, Davis. This is a humanitarian award presented annually to an individual who has, in his or her practice, promoted open-access to the materials and methods used in the life sciences.
The ceremony for the presentation of the award was held at the 2011 Bio-IT World Conference + Expo in Boston (http://bio-itworldexpo.com/).
In the words of his nominators, “Jonathan uses his high visibility in social media to advocate for open access by sharing links to discussions, mentioning open access articles and initiatives, and pushing for the opening up of popular closed access articles. This culture is shared with his students, who advocate for “open access” peer reviewing and created a peer-to-peer service for sharing bioinformatics material (articles, software and datasets). He is the academic editor in chief of PLoS Biology [1] and voices his opinions and support for open access publication and open data sharing on his “Tree of Life” blog [2]. In addition to just voicing his opinion, he also practices what he preaches, by refusing to publish in non-open access journals. With respect to bioinformatics, he has been involved with many software packages that are freely available, such as the recent AMPHORA [3] and PhyloOTU [4]. Lastly, Jonathan helped release a new open data sharing tool for scientists called BioTorrents [5]. This is just another step in encouraging all scientists to share their data and results more openly.”
REFERENCES:
1. http://www.plosbiology.org/
2. http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/
3. http://genomebiology.com/2008/9/10/R151
SPONSORS:
The Tenth Annual Benjamin Franklin Award in the Life Sciences is made possible by:
* Bio-IT World Conference & Expo - a premier event showcasing the myriad applications of IT and informatics to biomedical research and the drug discovery enterprise
* BioMed Central - publisher of over 200 open access journals
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
http://www.franklinaward.org/
