The 2005 Benjamin Franklin Award in Bioinformatics was awarded to Ewan Birney, a bioinformatician at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, England. While the award was announced in January, it became official today. From today's press release: 'Dr. Birney is being honored for his advocacy of placing human genome sequence data into the public domain via the Web. He has helped to ensure the free flow of this information as co-leader of the Ensembl project, an open access software system that provides annotation data on 16 vertebrate and other large genome sequences including chimpanzee and dog. "Dr. Birney has been a steadfast advocate of open access to the materials and methods used in bioinformatics, for which this award was created," says Jeff Bizzaro, founder of The Bioinformatics Organization. "His work at the EBI in Cambridge, England exemplifies his innovative spirit and cutting-edge thinking." "I support the open release of data because if you can grow the common area everyone works on, it furthers scientific discoveries," Dr. Birney says.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/19/2005 11:28:00 AM.
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.
