The Open Science Prize is an initiative from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the Wellcome Trust that is designed to encourage and support the practice of open science.

The winner this year was Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, whose team developed nextstrain.org, which is a website to integrate open sequence data from research teams around the world to help model the evolution of viruses in real time.  The platform provides a graphic tool to help facilitate pathogen surveillance and epidemiological investigations.

The importance of being open

Openness is at the very heart of the platform because they rely on huge amounts of open scientific data on viral sequence data to derive transmission patterns and evolutionary dynamics.  It’s data that is increasingly available, and what’s more, available in a time that makes it actionable.

“This has created a powerful situation during outbreaks, where context is needed for robust conclusions, so investigators are willing to share data,” Bedford says. “We need to put datasets together for comprehensive inferences about what is going on.”

The project will develop an integrated framework for real-time molecular epidemiology and evolutionary analysis of emerging epidemics, such as Ebola virus, MERS-CoV and Zika virus.

The project was one of six international teams to receive prizes, each of whom were aiming to utilize open data to advance discovery and improve health.  Winners were voted on by the public, with votes cast from 76 different countries around the world.

The winners were:

• Fruit Fly Brain Observatory – Allowing researchers to better conduct modeling of mental and neurological diseases by connecting data related to the fly brain
• MyGene2: Accelerating Gene Discovery with Radically Open Data Sharing (Runner-up) – Facilitating the public sharing of health and genetic data through integration with publicly available information
• OpenAQ: A Global Community Building the First Open, Real-Time Air Quality Data Hub for the World
• Open Neuroimaging Laboratory – Advancing brain research by enabling collaborative annotation, discovery and analysis of brain imaging data
• OpenTrialsFDA (Runner-up) – Enabling better access to drug approval packages submitted to and made available by the Food and Drug Administration
• NextStrain – Real-Time Evolutionary Tracking for Pathogen Surveillance and Epidemiological Investigation (Winner)