White House celebrates Open Science Champions of Change
On Thursday June 20, The White House celebrated the importance of Open Science
by recognizing the contributions of pioneers who understood that True Science must be Open.
The awardees
- Atul Butte, M.D., Ph.D. (stewarding the release of NIH immunology data to the public, Big Data)
- David Altshuler, M.D., Ph.D. (one of the founding members of the Broad Institute)
- David J. Lipman, M.D. (founder of NCBI, and introduced PubMed Central)
- Drew Endy, Ph.D. (BioBricks and OpenWetWare sharing for system biology)
- Eric Kansa, Ph.D. (Open Context, an open access publishing for archeology)
- Jack Andraka (High school student who created a cancer detection test),
- Read his blog post: Why Science Journal Paywalls Have to Go.
- Jeremiah P. Ostriker (helped initiate the Sloan Digital Sky Survey)
- John Quackenbush, Ph.D. (GenoSpace software platforms for data sharing)
- Kathy Giusti (Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, TIME 100 most influencial people)
- Paul Ginsparg, Ph.D. (Pioneer of open access who in 1991 created arXiv.org)
- Rebecca Moore (conceived and leads Google Earth Outreach Program).
- Stephen Friend, M.D., Ph.D. (President of Sage Bionetworks a modern Open Data / Open Access publisher)
- William Noel, Ph.D. (who you may remember from our post on the Archimedes Palimset).
At the ceremony, John P. Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, stated
“The proposition behind open science is a simple one:
more value is derived from scientific results
when more people can access and use them.”
Consistently with this basic principle, a February 2013 policy memorandum issued by OSTP Director Holdren directs Federal agencies to develop plans to:
Make the published results of federally funded research freely available
and a May 2013 Executive Order signed by the President
makes “open and machine readable” the default status for Government data.
US Chief Technology Officer Todd Park invited everyone to be part of an open data revolution, saying,
“We have taken the first steps towards open
as the default for scientific research results
and with your help and leadership we will keep plowing ahead….”
At Kitware we thank the many community members who help us be part of the Open Science Revolution, with their contributions to
- Open source toolkits for scientific research: ITK, VTK, Paraview.
- Open access journals and reproducible research platform: Insight Journal.
- Open data sharing platforms: Midas Platform.