Open Science Prize Finalists Announced

Earlier this week the six finalists for the first Open Science Prize were announced.  The prize is a joint effort of the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  Focused on encouraging the development of tools and services to make it easier to use open data, the six finalists were selected from a total competition pool of 96 teams representing 45 countries.  Each finalist team now has $80,000 to develop a prototype or refine an existing prototype.  The finalist teams are:

• OpenAQ: A Global Community Building the First Open, Real-Time Air Quality Data Hub for the World – Combines the existing real-time air quality data sources into one data hub.
• Real-Time Evolutionary Tracking for Pathogen Surveillance and Epidemiological Investigation – Promoting the open sharing of viral genomic data to make it easier to identify emerging epidemics.
• Open Neuroimaging Laboratory – An app program called BrainBox would facilitate collaborative annotation and analysis of brain imaging data.
• OpenTrialsFDA – Facilitates the access, searching and presentation of clinical trial data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
• Fruit Fly Brain Observatory – Creates a model of the fruit fly brain upon which researchers could apply computational disease models to assess the impacts of various drugs.
• MyGene2: Accelerating Gene Discovery with Radically Open Data Sharing – Facilitates sharing of medical information on single gene caused diseases to improve diagnoses.

The teams have until December 1 to make their final submissions, and the winner will be announced by February 28 of next year.