To learn more and submit your idea, visit the contest page.
Data re-use can generate new insights that in turn lead to vital health benefits. To stimulate and celebrate the innovative re-use of data, the Wellcome Trust has announced the launch of the Wellcome Data Re-use Prizes. With the support of Sage Bionetworks and its Synapse platform, the Wellcome Data Re-use Prizes will present two awards, each based on a topic of strategic importance to Wellcome: AMR surveillance and malaria.
The challenges create incentives for re-use and help form a community around the data.
“We are excited to partner with the Wellcome Trust to demonstrate how the re-use of public datasets can lead to better scientific insights,” said Dr. Larsson Omberg, Vice President for Systems Biology at Sage Bionetworks. “In addition to judging the reproducibility of the methods, we are encouraging people to work together by awarding extra points for new collaborations.”
Call for Entries
Wellcome is fully committed to ensuring that research outputs are made available to accelerate health benefits. This means that the researchers we support must maximize the availability of their data and other outputs with as few restrictions as possible.
Making data available in a timely and responsible way ensures other researchers can verify it, build on it, and use it to advance knowledge and make health improvements. But we don’t want to encourage data sharing for its own sake – we want the data that is shared by our researchers to be re-used by others to generate new insights and tools.
Wellcome Data Re-use Prizes
Entries have to generate a new insight, tool or health application from data available in an open data resource of Wellcome’s choosing.
There are two prizes, each based on a topic of strategic importance to Wellcome: AMR surveillance and malaria. The winner of each prize will get £15,000 (approx. $19,000 USD). Two runners-up will get £5,000 (approx. $6,400 USD).
To learn more and submit your idea, visit the contest page.
About Wellcome Trust: Wellcome exists to improve health for everyone by helping great ideas to thrive. We’re a global charitable foundation, both politically and financially independent. We support scientists and researchers, take on big problems, fuel imaginations, and spark debate. We remain true to the vision and values of our founder, Sir Henry Wellcome, a medical entrepreneur, collector and philanthropist. Our work today reflects the amazing breadth of Henry’s interests, and his belief that science and research expand knowledge by testing and investigating ideas.
About Sage Bionetworks: Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit research organization that believes that open practices can help accelerate biomedical research. Founded in 2009, our interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers work together to provide researchers access to technology tools and scientific approaches to share data, benchmark methods, and explore collective insights, all backed by Sage’s gold-standard governance protocols and commitment to user-centered design. Located in Seattle, Sage is supported through a portfolio of competitive research grants, commercial partnerships, and philanthropic contributions. Learn more at www.sagebionetworks.org.
