PLOS, the Public Library of Science, today announced the six finalists for the Accelerating Science Award Program (ASAP). The program recognizes the use of scientific research, published through Open Access, that has led to innovations benefiting society. Major sponsors include the Wellcome Trust and Google.

Three top awards of US$30,000 each will be announced on October 21 in Washington, DC at an Open Access Week kickoff event hosted by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the World Bank.

As award finalists, these individuals and teams are being honored 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. Open Access is the free, immediate online availability of articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully as long as the author and the original source are properly attributed.

“As these finalists illustrate, Open Access is good for science, good for business and good for the public, because it eliminates artificial constraints on the dissemination of research findings. This means that every student, every scientist and every citizen can benefit from any study published by Open Access done anywhere in the world,” said Elizabeth Marincola, Chief Executive Officer of PLOS. “The ASAP sponsors are proud to have received many worthy nominations. The six finalists embody the Open Access ethos by drawing on freely available research to create innovations that better society.”

The six finalists, and along with the challenges they address and their innovative approaches, include:

Measuring and Understanding the Sea
At a time when research shows 20,000 land and sea species to be directly threatened with extinction, marine ecologists are concerned they haven’t inventoried a vast number of oceanic species. Without this hard data, scientific knowledge and the potential effectiveness of conservation efforts are diminished. Dr Mark Costello co-ordinated the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), the largest real-time collaboration of species (taxonomic) experts and marine biologists in the world. Their work completed the naming of more than 200,000 known species, adding up to 2,000 new species every year. WoRMS is now the international standard for marine species nomenclature and is relied upon by a large number of institutions. In addition, a collection of Open Access articles specifically utilized the WoRMs Register.

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)

Visualizing Complex Science (Daniel Mietchen, PhD, Raphael Wimmer and Nils Dagsson Moskopp)

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.