Open access advocate Philip E. Bourne to receive 2009 Benjamin Franklin Award

"Phil Bourne had this great idea of creating a YouTube for science, and we have been strongly supportive because SciVee fills a real need among researchers to share their findings and pass along that knowledge to students who grew up with the Internet," said Ramesh Rao, director of the UC San Diego division of Calit2 and a professor in the university's Jacobs School of Engineering. "SciVee is particularly attractive to Calit2 because it uses new media in an innovative manner to deepen understanding of technical content."

But while the Internet has in recent years become a vital tool in reaching new audiences on an unprecedented scale, having full and unfettered access to important scientific research is still a different matter in many cases. "When things are highly restricted or copyrighted, the free flow of information is simply not there," he said.

The nomination committee for the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Award also recognized Bourne for his open-access work with the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and the Public Library of Science (PLoS), said Bizzaro. As associate director, Bourne helped the PDB – the single worldwide, open-access repository for three-dimensional structures of large molecules and nucleic acids – reach more than 170,000 unique users per month, with more than 57,000 molecule structures archived to date. The RCSB PDB is jointly managed by Rutgers University, under director Helen M. Berman, and the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at UC San Diego, with SDSC serving as the primary FTP site for users.

Bourne's research focus is on relevant biological and educational outcomes derived from computational science and scholarly communication, employing algorithms, text mining, machine learning, meta-languages, biological databases, and visualization to advance discovery in drug effects, evolution, cell signaling, apoptosis, and systems biology. He is also a founding editor-in-chief of the journal PLoS Computational Biology, part of the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource.

Bourne received his doctorate from the Flinders University, South Australia, in 1980. His other recent awards include the Flinders University Convocation Medal for Outstanding Achievement (2004), and the Sun Microsystems Convergence Award (2002).