The 2015 Bradley-Mason prize for open chemistry.

Open principles in the sciences in general and chemistry in particular are increasingly nowadays preached from funding councils down, but it can be more of a challenge to find innovative practitioners. Part of the problem perhaps is that many of the current reward systems for scientists do not always help promote openness. Jean-Claude Bradley was a young scientist who was passionately committed to practising open chemistry, even though when he started he could not have anticipated any honours for doing so. A year ago a one day meeting at Cambridge was held to celebrate his achievements, followed up with a special issue of the Journal of Cheminformatics. Peter Murray-Rust and I both contributed and following the meeting we decided to help promote Open Chemistry via an annual award to be called the Bradley-Mason prize. This would celebrate both “JC” himself and Nick Mason, who also made outstanding contributions to the cause whilst studying at Imperial College. The prize was initially to be given to an undergraduate student at Imperial, but was also extended to postgraduate students who have promoted and showcased open chemistry in their PhD researches.

Peter and I are delighted to announce the inaugural winners of this prize.

The postgraduate winner is Tom Phillips for his open blog describing his experiences as a PhD student and for leading by example. He has published his instrumental codes on Github (and now Zenodo[1]) and data and codes for reproducing the graphs in his work on the “lab on a chip” in Figshare[2] and through his blog has encouraged other research students to do the same. Tom has worked assiduously to ensure that all the articles describing his PhD work are or will be open access.[3]

The undergraduate winner is Tom Arrow for his “spare time” involvement with WikiMedia (the foundation that underpins the open Wikipedia), including participating in a Wikimedia EU hackathon in Lyon France, and feeding his experiences and skills back into his undergraduate environment as well as enhancing the teaching Wiki used by his fellow students. Tom took the lead in introducing us to Wikidata[4] for storing chemical data in an open Wikibase data repository and in promoting its use for enriching Wikipedia chemistry pages and showcasing open data in undergraduate teaching environments.

References

1. Tom Phillips., and Sam Macbeth., "pumpy: Zenodo release", 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19033
2. Thomas Phillips., James H Bannock., and John de Mello., "Data for microscale extraction and phase separation using a porous capillary", 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1447208
3. T.W. Phillips, J.H. Bannock, and J.C. deMello, "Microscale extraction and phase separation using a porous capillary", Lab on a Chip, vol. 15, pp. 2960-2967, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/C5LC00430F
4. D. Vrandečić, and M. Krötzsch, "Wikidata", Communications of the ACM, vol. 57, pp. 78-85, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2629489