openSNP wins PLoS/Mendeley Binary Battle
Mendeley and PLoS are delighted to announce the winners of the Binary Battle, an innovation challenge to make research more open and collaborative.
openSNP receives a grand prize of $10001 and PaperCritic wins $5000, with a special extra prize of $1000 awarded to rOpenSci for the best Mendeley/PLoS mashup. Warmest congratulations from all of us at PLoS to all of you!
“I always tell developers to work on stuff that matters. It’s time to stretch beyond the consumer internet, and what better place to focus than on furthering the cutting edges of science?” said Tim O‟Reilly, Founder and CEO of O‟Reilly Media.
The Binary Battle is an innovation challenge similar to the X-Prize, giving anyone access, for the first time ever, to a layer of social and demographic information about research, enabling research to be used by any application as a data source, like FourSquare uses location or Twitter uses status updates. This access was provided by the Mendeley and PLoS APIs. The winners were chosen by popular vote and an all-star panel of judges including Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly media, Juan Enriquez, Managing Director of Excel Venture Management, John Wilbanks, former VP for Science at Creative Commons, James Powell, CTO of Thompson Reuters, and Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com.
“We chose to implement PLoS and Mendeley early on in the development of openSNP as both are a great resources to find the latest publications on SNPs.”, said Bastian Greshake, a developer on the openSNP team. openSNP is a community-driven platform for publicly sharing genetic information, designed to enable crowdsourcing of associations between genetic traits and the physical manifestation of those traits, such as eye color or propensity for some diseases. Read an interview with the openSNP team at the Mendeley blog.