The Public Library of Science (PLOS) has announced the six finalists for the Accelerating Science Award Program (ASAP). The program recognises the use of scientific research, published through open access, that has led to innovations benefiting society. Major sponsors include the Wellcome Trust and Google; ARL and SPARC are also among the program sponsors. Three top awards of $30,000 each will be announced on October 21 in Washington, DC, at an Open Access Week kick-off event hosted by SPARC and the World Bank.
As award finalists, these individuals and teams are being honoured for addressing a real-world challenge either by reusing previously published open access research or by creating a new repository of freely available research data to assist current and future collaborative research projects. The six finalists, along with the challenges they address and their innovative approaches, include: HIV Self-Test Empowers Patients (Nitika Pant Pai, MD, MPH, PhD; Caroline Vadnais; Roni Deli-Houssein; and Sushmita Shivkumar); Global Collaboration to Fight Malaria (Matthew Todd, PhD); Smartphone Becomes Microscope (Saber Iftekhar Khan; Eva Schmid, PhD; and Oliver Hoeller, PhD); Calculating Ecotourism Impact (Ralf Buckley, PhD; Guy Castley, PhD; Clare Morrison, PhD; Alexa Mossaz; Fernanda de Vasconcellos Pegas; Clay Alan Simpkins; and Rochelle Steven); Measuring and Understanding the Sea (Mark J. Costello, PhD); and Visualizing Complex Science (Daniel Mietchen, PhD; Raphael Wimmer; and Nils Dagsson Moskopp).
Video interviews of the finalists can be found on the PLOS website. The six finalists will be narrowed down to three award recipients by an international committee composed of distinguished leaders in multiple fields.
The ASAP program sponsors share a commitment to affect policy and public understanding to support the adoption of open access. They include the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Co-Action Publishing, Copernicus Publications, Creative Commons, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Doris Duke Charitable Trust, Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL), eLife, Hindawi, Health Research Alliance (HRA), Howard Hughes Medical Institute, ImpactStory, Jisc, Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science, Mendeley, Microsoft Research, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), Research Councils UK (RCUK), Research Libraries UK (RLUK), Social Science Research Network (SSRN), the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), SURF (Netherlands), the World Bank, and major sponsors Google, PLOS and the Wellcome Trust.
