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RSS feedsTwo projects representing the most innovative and easily implemented life science tools have scooped the Elsevier Grand Challenge.
Launched by the global healthcare and scientific publisher in June 2008, the competition invited researchers to prototype tools dealing with the ever-increasing amount of online life sciences information. The judges included academics, library professionals, information science experts and product developers.
The project “Reflect: Automated annotation of scientific terms” won the first prize of $35,000 (£23,900). The team included researchers Sean I O’Donoghue, Lars Jensen, Heiki Horn, Evangelos Pafilis, Michael Kuhn, Nigel P Brown and Reinhard Schneider from EMBL Germany.
The second prize of $15,000 (£10,250) was awarded to the project “CORAAL: Dive into publications, bathe in the knowledge”. Researchers in this team were Vit Novacek, Tudor Groza and Siegfried Handschuh from DERI in Ireland.
Ph.D student Novacek said: “The tool has taken more than half a year to build. We started to build from scratch, and then entirely reworked the back end of the tool after we got comments from the judges in the semi-final round.”
The two teams said they planned to collaborate to co-develop tools to improve scientific communication. They were chosen from a final shortlist of four teams following the demonstration of their tool and responses to questions from the judges and an audience of life science researchers.
“The challenge has helped produce some very good science,” said secretary of the panel of judges, Anita de Waard, Elsevier Labs. “It seems clear that there is no single solution to solving the information infarct in biology. Apart from helping to develop some innovative thinking about improved ways to publish and access science, the challenge has led to several collaborations between the participants.”
Elsevier aims to stimulate the formation of a budding community to work on new ways of publishing science through this competition and a related conference on the future of research communication.
