Skip to main content

  • ​placeholder
  • placeholder
Enabling discoveries for health – let’s harness the innovative power of open data


The Open Science Prize is a collaboration between the Wellcome Trust, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to unleash the power of open content and data to advance biomedical research and its application for health benefit.

OUR SIX FINALISTS
 
The six winners of the phase I prizes were announced at the 7th Health Datapalooza in Washington DC on 9 May 2016.  The teams will have until 1 December 2016 to work on their prototypes, before submitting them for the phase II competition – where one team will receive a grand prize of $230,000.
 
Find out more about our six finalists.
 
ABOUT THE PRIZE
 
The Prize provides funding to encourage and support the prototyping and development of services, tools or platforms that enable open content – including publications, datasets, codes and other research outputs – to be discovered, accessed and re-used in ways that will advance discovery and spark innovation. It also aims to forge new international collaborations that bring together open science innovators to develop services and tools of benefit to the global research community.
 
This first round of the Prize consists of a two-phase competition. For the first phase, international teams competed for funding to take new ideas for products or services to the prototype stage, or to further develop an existing early-stage prototype.  Six prizes of $80,000 each have been awarded for teams to develop their innovation over a seven-month period. In the second phase, the phase I prize recipient judged to have the prototype with the greatest potential to advance open science will receive a prize of $230,000.
 
All teams applying for the Prize had to include at least one member based in the US, and at least one member based in another country.
 
The partner funders convened a panel of expert advisers to review Prize entries.  We also established a list of data resources to illustrate the types of content and data that teams might utilise in their innovations, which is also available as a Collection on the BioSharing platform.
 
Further information about the Prize can be found on the FAQ page.
 
Please note that the application process has now closed.
 
The Phase I competition
 
We had a fantastic response to the Prize, with 96 teams entering the phase I competition.  Teams included over 450 innovators from 45 countries, spanning 5 continents.  You can browse the 96 entries, and read more in this blog post.
 
We were enormously grateful for all the work the teams put into their applications.
 
The six phase I prize winners were announced publicly on 7 May 2016 at the 7th Health Datapalooza.

Webinar

The funders held a webinar on 10 December 2015 (11:00 EST; 16:00 GMT) to further discuss the Prize with potential entrants and answer questions.  The Webinar presentations are available, and the Webinar recording is available for download as an MP4 file.  A recording of the webinar may also be viewed on YouTube here.

Full competition schedule

Prize launched and opened for entries:
20 Oct 2015

Deadline for entrants for phase I prize: 
29 Feb 2016

Judging completed and phase I prizes announced:  
9 May 2016

Deadline for phase II applications (for phase I prize recipients):
1 Dec 2016

Phase II prize winner announced:
28 Feb 2017

All content on this site, unless otherwise indicated, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).