The nominees are as follows (included are some of the reasons for nomination, as explained by nominators both past and present):

MICHAEL ASHBURNER, University of Cambridge: ``Michael Ashburner has made fundamental contributions to many open access bioinformatics projects including FlyBase [1], the GASP project [2], the Gene Ontology project [3], and the Open Biological Ontologies project [4], and he was instrumental in the establishment of the European Bioinformatics Institute [5]. He is also known for advocating open access to biological information [6].''

HELEN BERMAN, Protein Data Bank: ``Helen Berman manages the world's largest protein data bank [7] and manages to do so free of cost to the general scientific community. Free and open data access was one of the cornerstones of PDB policy from the beginning, when few of us even thought about these issues (and indeed many of us were not even born). In this sense, Helen's efforts have been pioneering for the whole community.''

PHIL BOURNE, University of California at San Diego: ``As Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of the open access journal PLoS Computational Biology, Phil Bourne has worked tirelessly to establish a premier journal in our field that is free to all - thus strengthening the ideals of openness in the bioinformatics community [8]. As co-Director of the Protein Data Bank, he is responsible for the continued free access to structural data and software distributed through the San Diego Supercomputer Center. And he continues to develop openly accessible tools, including source code, in wide use by the bioinformatics community. Examples include CE, a structure comparison algorithm that has been cited approximately 400 times and the newer molecular biology toolkit.''

SEAN EDDY, HHMI and University of Washington: ``The creation of HMMer HMM software [9] and its free distribution to academic and commercial users has revolutionized - or essentially created - the use of profile HMMs in protein sequence analysis. And the creation and development of the Pfam family of protein domains [10] has been an essential counterpart, which is the basis of genome annotations, family classification systems such as GO and much of our common language of protein annotation. His work on small RNAs has also helped launch that field and a variety of other open access software tools and analyses has had profound effects on the field.''

DON GILBERT, Indiana University: ``Don Gilbert single-handedly did something that no other person in his time did. His contribution to bioinformatics community is enormous but little appreciated. He established the IUBio archive [11] and developed one of the first Internet-available interfaces to GenBank. The creation and maintenance of IUBio, against all odds, was a marvelous effort and should really be applauded. He also developed the widely used programs readseq [12] and SeqPup [13].''

The ceremony for the presentation of the Award will be held during the Sixth Annual Meeting of Bioinformatics.Org, in conjunction with Bio-IT World's 2006 Life Sciences Conference + Expo in Boston, on April 3-5, 2006. It involves a short introduction, the presentation of the certificate, and the laureate seminar. Please see http://www.lifesciencesexpo.com for more information on the event.

Past laureates of the Benjamin Franklin Award include Ewan Birney (2005), Lincoln Stein (2004), James Kent (2003), and Michael Eisen (2002). More information can be found at http://bioinformatics.org/franklin/.

Members may vote online (need to be logged in):
http://bioinformatics.org/franklin/vote/

References:
1. http://www.flybase.org
2. http://www.fruitfly.org/GASP1/
3. http://www.geneontology.org
4. http://obo.sourceforge.net
5. http://www.ebi.ac.uk
6. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2061
7. http://www.wwpdb.org
8. http://compbiol.plosjournals.org
9. http://hmmer.wustl.edu
10. http://pfam.wustl.edu
11. http://iubio.bio.indiana.edu
12. http://iubio.bio.indiana.edu/soft/molbio/readseq/java/
13. http://iubio.bio.indiana.edu/soft/molbio/seqpup/java/