Elsevier's grand challenge down to the 10 best tools

Healthcare and scientific publisher Elsevier has announced 10 semi-finalists in its grand challenge to the scientific community to come up with innovative tools for life science information in online text databases.

The semi-finalists were chosen by a panel of judges from more than 70 entries which offered a wide range of approaches, including semantics, visualisation, protocols, social networks and citations.

Noelle Gracy, genetics and cell biology publisher and the grand challenge co-organiser, said: “The semi-finalists will be given access to more than half a million life science articles, including their images and supplementary files, to build their tool.

“Access to such a large and diverse body of work will give them the opportunity to scale up their ideas and really test them to see if they can make something that will change the way life scientists read, write, visualise – even think about – data.”

The finalists will be announced at the end of the year, and asked to present vision papers to the judging panel and the public in February 2009. The eventual winner will receive a cash prize of $35,000, and the runner-up $15,000.

Contestants may be offered the chance to develop their tools in collaboration with Elsevier.

David Shotton, Elsevier challenge judge and member of the Image Bioinformatics Research Group at the University of Oxford’s department of zoology, said: “Some of these creative ideas will enable scientists to explore, visualise and expose the meaning within biological journal articles more thoroughly and effectively, providing better accessibility to the underlying data within research papers.

“This grand challenge will give semantic publishing a kick-start, to the benefit of everyone’s research experience.”

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