Benjamin Franklin Award - Bioinformatics.Org

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was one of the most remarkable men of his time. Scientist, inventor, statesman, he freely and openly shared his ideas and refused to patent his inventions. It is the opinion of the founders of the Bioinformatics Organization, Inc. that he embodied the best traits of a scientist, and we seek to honor those who share these virtues.

``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.''

The Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences is a humanitarian/bioethics award presented annually by this organization to an individual who has, in his or her practice, promoted free and open access to the materials and methods used in the life sciences.

Click here for more information on Dr. Franklin, from the Franklin Institute.

Sponsors

Laureates

2011 - Jonathan A. Eisen
Jonathan A. Eisen is awarded the 2011 Benjamin Franklin Award. 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 and voices his opinions and support for open access publication and open data sharing on his "Tree of Life" blog. 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 and PhyloOTU. Lastly, Jonathan helped release a new open data sharing tool for scientists called BioTorrents. This is just another step in encouraging all scientists to share their data and results more openly.

2010 - Alex Bateman
Alex Bateman is awarded the 2010 Benjamin Franklin Award for leading the freely available and very useful Pfam, Rfam and MEROPS databases at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute since moving there in 1997. He was also the Executive Editor for the open-access Database issue of the journal Nucleic Acids Research for many years. Furthermore, Bateman helped initiate the RNA Families track at the journal RNA Biology, where a Wikipedia article is required for each published RNA family.

2009 - Philip E. Bourne
Philip E. Bourne is awarded the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Award 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. 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.

2008 - Robert Gentleman
Robert Gentleman is awarded the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Award for his work on the R suite of statistical tools and, together with other core members, founding and developing BioConductor, an open-source and open-development software project for the analysis and comprehension of genomic data. More importantly, Robert has a strong ethical view on the meaning of publishing data, with an emphasis on sharing data-transformation methods as well as the underlying data.

2007 - Sean Eddy
Sean Eddy is awarded the 2007 Benjamin Franklin Award for the development and free distribution of HMMER, which has revolutionized the use of profile Hidden Markov Models in protein sequence analysis, and for the co-creation of the Pfam database of protein domains and families, which has been an essential counterpart as the basis of genome annotations, family classification systems such as GO, and much of our common language of protein annotation.

2006 - Michael Ashburner
Michael Ashburner is awarded the 2006 Benjamin Franklin Award for making fundamental contributions to many open-access bioinformatics projects, including FlyBase, the GASP project, the Gene Ontology project, and the Open Biological Ontologies project. He is also known for advocating open access to biological information.

2005 - Ewan Birney
Ewan Birney is awarded the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Award for his promotion of Open Access in bioinformatics and science. He has been a key developer in the Ensembl and BioPerl projects and a strong advocate for making genome information freely available.

2004 - Lincoln D. Stein
Lincoln D. Stein is awarded the 2004 Benjamin Franklin Award for his creation of a great number of open-source bioinformatics programs and for championing open-source principals in many venues, including published reviews, lectures, seminars, funding-review panels, and advisory board meetings.

2003 - James Kent
James Kent is awarded the 2003 Benjamin Franklin Award for developing GigAssembler, a 10,000 line program that he wrote in a month and then used to assemble the public human genome fragments. This was accomplished before Celera Genomics was able to assemble their private genome, helping to keep the data in the public domain and unrestricted by commercial patents.

2002 - Michael B. Eisen
Michael B. Eisen is awarded the 2002 Benjamin Franklin Award for his work on the Public Library of Science and for the gratis availability of his software for microarray cluster analyses.

Selection

Click here for information on the selection process.

Ceremony

The ceremony for the presentation of the Award is held during the Annual Meeting of Bioinformatics.Org. It involves a short introduction, the presentation of the certificate, and the laureate seminar.

Past Sponsors

We wish to thank IDG World Expo and O'Reilly & Associates, past sponsors and hosts of the award ceremonies.