Last Thursday night I was privileged to be invited to the 10th anniversary celebrations for BioMedCentral and to help announce and give the first BMC Open Data Prize. Peter Murray-Rust has written about the night and the contribution of Vitek Tracz to the Open Access movement. Here I want to focus on the prize we gave, the rationale behind it, and the (difficult!) process we went through to select a winner.

Cameron Neylon

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Last Thursday night I wasÂ privilegedÂ to be invited to the 10th
anniversary celebrations for [BioMedCentral](http://biomedcentral.com)
and to help announce and give the first [BMC Open Data
Prize](http://www.biomedcentral.com/researchawards/opendata/). [Peter
Murray-Rust](http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/) has [written
about the night](http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=2445) and
the contribution of Vitek Tracz to the Open Access movement. Here I want
to focus on the prize we gave, the rationale behind it, and the
(difficult!) process we went through to select a winner.

Prizes motivate behaviour in researchers. There is no question that
being able to put a prize down on your CV is a useful thing. I have long
felt, originally following a suggestion from [Jeremiah
Faith](http://www.jeremiahfaith.com/), that a prize for Open Research
would be a valuable motivator and publicity aid to support those who are
making an effort. I was very happy therefore to be asked to help judge
the prize, supported by Microsoft, to be awarded at the BMC celebration
for the paper in a BMC journal that was an oustanding example of Open
Data.
[IainÂ Hrynaszkiewicz](http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/iain-hrynaszkiewicz/7/301/aa8)
and Matt Cockerill from [BMC](http://www.biomedcentral.com/), [Lee
Dirks](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/ldirks/) from
[Microsoft
Research](http://research.microsoft.com/ "Microsoft Research"){.zem_slink
rel="homepage"}, along with myself, [Rufus
Pollock](http://www.rufuspollock.org/), [John
Wilbanks](http://creativecommons.org/about/people#johnwilbanks), and
Peter Murray-Rust tried to select from a very strong list of contenders
a shortlist and a prize winner.

Early on we decided to focus on papers that made data available rather
than software frameworks or approaches that supported data availability.
We really wanted to focus attention on conventional scientists in
traditional disciplines that were going beyond the basic requirements.
This meant in turn that a whole range of very important contributions
from developers, policy experts, and others were left out. Particularly
noteable examples were "[Taxonomic information exchange and copyright:
the Plazi approach](http://www.biomedcentral.com/1756-0500/2/53%20)" and
"[The FANTOM web resource: from mammalian transcriptional landscape to
its dynamic regulation](http://genomebiology.com/2009/10/4/R40%20)".

This still left a wide field of papers making significant amounts of
data available. To cut down at this point we looked at the licences (or
lack thereof) under which resources were being made available. Anything
that wasn't broadly speaking "open" was rejected at this point. This
included code that wasn't open source, data that was only available via
a login, or that had non-commercial terms. None of the data provided was
explicitly placed in the public domain, as [recommended by Science
Commons](http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/)
and the [Panton Principles](http://pantonprinciples.org/), but a
reasonable amount was made available in an accessible form with no
restrictions beyond a request for citation. This is an area where we
expect best practice to improve and we see the prize as a way to achieve
that. To be considered any external resource will have to be compliant
ideally with all of Science Commons Protocols, the [Open Knowledge
Definition](http://www.opendefinition.org/), and the Panton Principles.
This means an explicit dedication of data to the public domain via
[PDDL](http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/) or
[ccZero](http://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/).

Much of the data that we looked at was provided in the form of Excel
files. This is not ideal but in terms of accessibility it's actually not
so bad. While many of us might prefer XML, RDF, or at any rate CSV files
the bottom line is that it is possible to open most Excel files with
freely available open source software, which means the data is
accessible to anyone. Note that "most" though. It is very easy to create
Excel files that make data very hard to extract. Column headings are
crucial (and were missing or difficult to understand in many cases) and
merging and formatting cells is an absolute disaster. I don't want to
point to examples but a plea to those who are trying to make data
available: if you must use Excel just put column headings and row
headings. No merging, no formatting, no graphs. And ideally export it as
CSV as well. It isn't as pretty but useful data isn't about being
pretty. The figures and tables in your paper are for the human readers,
for supplementary data to be useful it needs to be in a form that
computers can easily access.

We finally reduced our shortlist to only about ten papers where we felt
people had gone above and beyond the average. "[Large-scale insertional
mutagenesis of a coleopteran stored grain pest, the red flour beetle
Tribolium castaneum, identifies embryonic lethal mutations and enhancer
traps](http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/7/73%20)" received
particular plaudits for making not just data but the actual beetles
available. ["Assessment of methods and analysis of outcomes for
comprehensive optimization of
nucleofection](http://www.gvt-journal.com/content/7/1/6/%20)" and "[An
Open Access Database of Genome-wide Association
Results](http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2350/10/6%20)" were both well
received as efforts to make a comprehensive data resource available.

In the end though we were required to pick just one winner. The winning
paper got everyone's attention right from the beginning as it came from
an area of science not necessarily known for widespread data
publication. It simply provided all of the pieces of information, almost
without comment, in the form of clearly set out tables. They are in
Excel and there are some issues with formatting and presentation,
multiple sheets, inconsistent tabulation. It would have been nice to see
more of the analysis code used as well. But what appealed most was that
the data were simply provided above and beyond what appeared in the main
figures as a natural part of the presentation and that the data were in
a form that could be used beyond the specific study. So it was a great
pleasure to present the prize to [Yoosuk
Lee](http://faculty.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclanzaro/lab/people/Yoosook.html)
on behalf of the authors of "[Ecological and genetic relationships of
the](http://www.malariajournal.com/content/8/1/75/)
*[Forest-M](http://www.malariajournal.com/content/8/1/75/)* [form among
chromosomal and molecular forms of the malaria
vector](http://www.malariajournal.com/content/8/1/75/) *[Anopheles
gambiae sensu
stricto](http://www.malariajournal.com/content/8/1/75/)[".]{style="font-style: normal;"}*

Many challenges remain, making this data discoverable, and improving the
licensing and accessibility all round. Given that it is early days, we
were impressed by the range of scientists making an effort to make data
available. Next year we will hope to be much stricter on the
requirements and we also hope to see many more nominations. In a sense
for me, the message of the evening was that the debate on Open Access
publishing is over, its only a question of where the balance ends up.
Our challenge for the future is to move on and solve the problems of
making data, process, and materials more available and accessible so as
to drive more science.

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Image via Wikipedia  Last Thursday night I wasÂ privilegedÂ to be invited to the 10th anniversary celebrations for BioMedCentral and to help announce and give the first BMC Open Data Prize. Peter Murray-Rust has written about the night and the contribution of Vitek Tracz to the Open Access movement. Here I want to focus on the prize we gave, the rationale behind it, and the (difficult!) process we went through to select a winner.

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The BMC 10th Anniversary Celebrations and Open Data Prize