NIH www.nih.gov has partnered with London-based Wellcome Trust www.wellcome.ac.uk to launch a global science competition for new products or services to advance “Open Science”, a movement to make research data more broadly accessible to the public.
The “Open Science Prize” www.openscienceprize.org was made possible through a Memorandum of Understanding between NIH and Wellcome Trust but the Howard Hughes Medical Institute www.hhmi.org is also contributing funds to Wellcome Trust for the effort.
The goal of the “Open Science Prize” is to support the development and prototyping of services, tools and platforms to overcome these hurdles so that data can be used to advance discovery and spur innovation.
The NIH effort is part of the “Big Data to Knowledge Initiative” http://datascience.nih.gov/bd2k launched in December 2013 as a trans-NIH program with funding available from all 27 institutes and centers as well as the NIH Common Fund.
Up to six teams of technology experts and researchers stand to win $80,000 each to develop new ideas into a prototype or to advance an existing early stage prototypes. The prototypes judged to have the greatest potential will receive $230,000.
The first phase of the competition is accepting applications through February 29, 2016. Six teams will be selected to receive the prize money to use to advance their ideas to prototypes. The prototypes must be submitted by December 1, 2016 with the winner expected to be selected on February 28, 2017.