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New EMBL service makes web browsing efficient for biologists, June 2009
Help to make missing links - Times Higher Education, May 2009
Press Release: Winners Announced- April 22, 2009
Eye of the Tiger - Technology Ireland, March 2009
Stanford University and EMBL Platforms Aim to Give Users a Low-Pain Handle on Ontologies - Genomeweb.com
Elsevier Challenges Contestants to Solve Information Overload Dilemmas - EContent, March, 2009
Interview with Anita de Waard - Financieel Dagbad, February 2, 2009
Press Release - January 6, 2009
Information World Review - September, 2008
Press Release - August 1, 2008
Press Release - June 3, 2008

Press Release - April 22, 2009

Winners Announced in the Elsevier Grand Challenge

First and Second Prize Winners Design Life Science Tools of the Future

Amsterdam, April 22, 2009 - Elsevier, a leading global healthcare and scientific publisher, has announced the winners of the Elsevier Grand Challenge.  The competition, launched in June 2008, invited researchers to prototype tools dealing with the ever-increasing amount of online life sciences information. The winners have been chosen by a distinguished panel of judges to represent the tools thought to be the most innovative and implementable: First place, a cash prize of $35,000, second place, $15,000.

The first and second prize winners were announced at the Experimental Biology conference in New Orleans and chosen from four finalist teams. Each of the four Grand Challenge finalists gave a demonstration of their tool and responded to questions from the panel of judges and an audience of life science researchers.  They then answered questions from a live online audience of researchers attending virtually via the Elsevier Grand Challenge Q&A webinar. The judges announced the winning entries live on the webinar. Finalists are available for interviews on site at the Experimental Biology conference.

First prize winner:  Sean I. O’Donoghue, Lars J. Jensen, Heiko Horn, Evangelos Pafilis, Michael Kuhn, Nigel P. Brown and Reinhard Schneider, EMBL Germany, for their project “Reflect: Automated Annotation of Scientific Terms”

Second prize winner: Vit Novacek, Tudor Groza and Siegfried Handschuh, DERI, Ireland, for their project CORAAL—Dive into Publications, Bathe in the Knowledge

“I speak for the team when I say that we’re all really happy and proud to have received the award,” said O’Donoghue of the Reflect team.  “The event has been fantastic stimulus to not only my team but all the teams here, and we plan to collaborate with quite a few of those teams.”

“The tool has taken more than half a year to build,” said second prize winner and Ph.D. student Vit Novacek. “It didn’t exist when we heard of the competition, and we just thought of what we could do with our research skills.  We started to build from scratch, and then we reworked the back end of the tool entirely after we got comments from the judges in the semi-final round.  It’s really exciting to work in such a dynamic manner.”

“We are delighted to award the first and second prizes to Sean and Vit.“ remarked Dr. Eduard Hovy, Chair Panel of Judges and Director of the Natural Language Group, Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, “Their tools demonstrate thoughtful design,  provide genuine and immediate improvements in scientific communication and point the way toward interesting new possibilities for the future.  Given so many excellent submissions, it was very difficult to choose between the four finalists.  All of the tools were developed with a strong sense of the community’s needs.”

"I was impressed not only with the quality of the tools the finalists developed, but with the atmosphere of collaboration,” added Herman van Campenhout, CEO, Elsevier.  “Though the teams were in competition with one another, they were very open with their ideas, and a real sense of community has developed around the Elsevier Grand Challenge.  We feel, more than ever, that by listening to what researchers want, and by partnering with members of the community to co-develop tools to improve scientific communication, we can create some very innovative solutions together.  It’s quite a fresh approach.”

“The most amazing outcome of the challenge, I believe, is that it has actually helped produce some very good science,” commented Anita de Waard of Elsevier Labs, Researcher Disruptive Technologies and co-organizer of the Challenge. “It seems clear that there is no single solution to solving the information infarct in biology.  Apart from helping develop some wonderfully innovative thinking about improved ways to publish and access science, the Challenge has already led to several collaborations between the participants.  We hope the Challenge and our planned conference on the Future of Research Communication can stimulate the formation of a budding community to work on new ways of publishing science.”

# # #

Notes to Editors:
For more information about the awards, visit www.elseviergrandchallenge.com      
About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier’s 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com/), MD Consult (http://www.mdconsult.com/), Scopus (http://www.info.scopus.com/), bibliographic databases, and online reference works.

Elsevier (http://www.elsevier.com/) is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc (http://www.reedelsevier.com/), a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier's ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

Financieel DagbladInterview with Anita de Waard - Financieel Daglad, February 2, 2009

"Laypeople, parttimers, and open innovation change the face of science"
Interview with Anita de Waard, Principal Researcher Disruptive Technologies at Elsevier Labs about how open innovation, “crowd sourcing”, parttime scientists and online research done by laymen will help to change the face of science. De Waard, herself a "parttime scientist" at the University of Utrecht used the principle of Open Innovation to set up The Elsevier Grand Challenge:  Knowledge Enhancement in the Life Sciences, a competition which invites researchers around the world to prototype tools dealing with the "information overload" specific to life sciences. The Challenge generated seventy submissions and is now down to four finalists who will present their ideas at the Experimental Biology conference in April. The FD article also discusses the strict codes and conventions adhered to in publishing a scholarly article and how this can disadvantage non-Western researchers in the peer review process.

Published in Financieel Dagblad, February 2, 2009


Press Release - January 6, 2009

Finalists Announced in the Elsevier Grand Challenge

Scientists Assess Life Science Tools to Accelerate Science

Amsterdam, January 6, 2009 Elsevier, a leading global healthcare and scientific publisher, has announced the four finalists chosen in the Elsevier Grand Challenge, a competition inviting researchers to prototype tools dealing with the ever-increasing amount of online life sciences information.  (www.elseviergrandchallenge.com).  The semifinalist round was held on December 15th at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston and featured each of the nine Grand Challenge teams providing demonstrations to a distinguished panel of judges and fellow contestants. The applications used technologies ranging from semantic search engines, image query to social networking tools, and interactive visualizations.

The four finalists chosen by the panel of judges represent the tools thought to be most innovative and implementable:

  • Seán I. O' Donoghue, Lars Jensen Heiki Horn, Evangelos Pafilis, Michael Kuhn, Nigel P. Brown, and Reinhard Schneider, Germany, for “Reflect: Automated Annotation of Scientific Terms”
  • Vıt Novacek, Tudor Groza, Ioana Hulpus, and Siegfried Handschuh, Ireland, “CORAAL – Dive into Publications, Bathe in the Knowledge ”
  • Amr Ahmed, Andrew Arnold, Luis Pedro Coelho, Joshua Kangas, Abdul-Saboor Sheik, Eric Xing, William Cohen and Robert F. Murphy, USA, “Structured Literature Image Finder”
  • Stephen Wan, Cecile Paris, Robert Dale, Michael Muthukrishna, Ilya Anisimoff and Julien Blondeau, Australia, “Citation Sensitive In-Browser Summarisation of Cited Documents”

“This was an amazingly complementary collection of proposals on how to optimize the access to the information in the literature,” added Judge Alfonso Valencia, Director of the Structural Biology and BioComputing Programme of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid.  “I was truly impressed by the variety and quality of the proposals—ones that can shape the future of scientific publishing.”

"I was delighted not only with the quality of the presentations, but also with the discussions that resulted both with the judges and the other teams,” added Challenge Judge David Rosenthal, of Stanford University Libraries in Palo Alto.    

Finalist Sean O’Donoghue (Research Scientist, EMBL, Germany) agreed:  “All participants of the meeting this week are already winners: the meeting was the reward.  Personally, I made 2 or 3 strong collaborations during that meeting, as well as getting and giving feedback and advice.  The meeting put so much more life on the bones of the Elsevier Grand Challenge, and encourages us to go forward and participate more.”

“The Grand Challenge was a great example of Elsevier’s initiative to accelerate science by collaborating with scientists.” said Challenge Judge Rafael Sidi, VP of Product Management with ScienceDirect.  “Scientists from very different disciplines were able to meet and exchange ideas on scientific communication.” 

 

“In hosting the Challenge, we have made contact with a very large, and heterogeneous group of researchers interested in improving the way science in published,” commented Anita de Waard of Elsevier Labs, Researcher Disruptive Technologies and co-organizer of the Challenge. “There is a community of people out there interested in tackling these issues, and some of us have met through this event – in the next iterations of the challenge, we hope to build on and stay in touch with this community”.

Elsevier Grand Challenge Finalists are invited to present their vision papers to the judges and the public in April 2009 at the Experimental Biology Conference in New Orleans. Their work will then be presented at a live webinar during which the winner will be chosen. 

The first place winner will receive a cash prize of $35,000 and the runner up will be awarded a $15,000 prize.  Semifinalists and finalists can also be offered the opportunity to commercially develop their tools, in collaboration with Elsevier.

# # #

About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier’s 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com/), MD Consult (http://www.mdconsult.com/), Scopus (http://www.info.scopus.com/), bibliographic databases, and online reference works.
Elsevier (http://www.elsevier.com/) is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc (http://www.reedelsevier.com/), a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier's ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

Notes to Editors:
For more information about the awards, visit www.elseviergrandchallenge.com  

 


Press Release - August 1, 2008

 

Elsevier Announces Ten Semi-finalists for the Elsevier Grand Challenge

 Semi-finalists to work with 500,000+ articles to create the life sciences tools of the future

Amsterdam, August 1, 2008 Elsevier, a leading global healthcare and scientific publisher, has announced ten semi-finalists in The Elsevier Grand Challenge, a competition inviting the scientific community to prototype tools innovating how Life Sciences information is used in online text databases. The ten semifinalists were chosen by a distinguished panel of judges from among over 70 excellent entries offering a range of approaches involving semantics, visualization, protocols, social networks, and citations. The semifinalists include:

  • Sean O'Donoghue and Lars Jensen, Germany, for “Reflect: Automated Annotation of Scientific Terms”
  • Timothy Baldwin, Lawrence Cavedon, Sarvnaz Karimi, David Martinez, David Newman, Falk Scholer and Justin Zobel, Australia and US, “Effective Search, Classification, and Visualisation of Information from Large Collections of Biomedical Literature”
  • Vit Novacek, Siegfried Handschuh and Tudor Groza, Ireland, “Teaching Machines to Teach Us: A Truly Knowledge-Based Publication Management”
  • Amr Ahmed, Andrew Arnold, Luis Pedro Coelho, Saboor Sheikh, Eric Xing, William Cohen and Robert F. Murphy, US, “Information Retrieval and Topic Discovery using both Figures and Captions in Biological Literature”
  • Stephen Wan, Robert Dale and Cecile Paris, Australia, “In-Context Summaries of Cited Documents: A Research Prototype for Academic and Scholarly Literature”
  • Roderic Page, UK, “Towards realising Darwin’s dream: setting the trees free”
  • Jose Gonzalez-Brenes, Aabid Shariff, Sourish Chaudhuri and Carolyn Rose, US, “Automating the Generation of Life Science Protocols”
  • Glenn Ford, Sameer Antani, Dina Demner Fushman and George Thoma, US, “Tools to build and use Interactive Publications”
  • Michael Greenacre and Trevor Hastie, Spain and US, “Guided Tours in N-Dimensional Space:  Dynamic Visualization of Multivariate Data”
  • Alexander Garcia and Alberto Labarga, Germany and Spain, “A tale of two cities in the land of serendipity: The semantic web and the social web heading towards a living document in life sciences.”

“We’re confident that we’ve gathered an exciting crop of projects,” remarked David Shotton, Image Bioinformatics Research Group, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford and Elsevier Challenge Judge, “Some of these very creative ideas will undoubtedly enable scientists to explore, visualize and expose the meaning contained within biological journal articles more thoroughly and effectively, providing better accessibility to the underlying data contained within research papers.  This Grand Challenge will give semantic publishing a kick start, to the benefit of everyone's research experience.”

Emilie Marcus, Editor-in-Chief, Cell, Cambridge MA, noted, "As one of the judges, I was thrilled and inspired to see such a diverse and creative range of proposals for how to make the daily work of scientists easier and more productive.  We await the semi-finalists' presentations in December with bated breath!”

“The semi-finalists will be given access to more than half a million life science articles, including their images and supplementary files in order to build their tool,” said Noelle Gracy, Genetics and Cell Biology Publisher and Grand Challenge organizer.  “Access to such a large and diverse body of work will give them the opportunity to scale up their ideas and really test them to see if they can make something that will really change the way life scientists read, write, visualize--even think about--data.”

Elsevier Grand Challenge Finalists will be announced at the end of the year will be invited to present vision papers to the judging panel and the public in February 2009. The first place winner will receive a cash prize of $35,000 and the runner up will be awarded a $15,000 prize.  As an additional benefit, finalists will enjoy free access to ScienceDirect and Scopus. Furthermore, contestants may be offered the opportunity to develop their tools in collaboration with Elsevier.

# # #

About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier’s 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com/), MD Consult (http://www.mdconsult.com/), Scopus (http://www.info.scopus.com/), bibliographic databases, and online reference works.

Elsevier (http://www.elsevier.com/) is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc (http://www.reedelsevier.com/), a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier's ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

Notes to Editors:
For more information about the awards, visit www.elseviergrandchallenge.com    


Press Release - June 3, 2008

 

Elsevier Launches Competition for the Scientific Community in Knowledge Enchancement in the Life Sciences

Amsterdam, June 3, 2008 - Elsevier, a leading global healthcare and scientific publisher, announced today that it has launched a new competition inviting the scientific community to prototype tools to innovate how Life Sciences information is used in online text databases. “ The Elsevier Grand Challenge: Knowledge Enhancement in the Life Sciences” is designed to generate useful new ideas that will contribute to improving the productivity of life science researchers.

The deadline for submitting abstracts for The Elsevier Grand Challenge is July 15th. Winning ideas will improve the process of creating, reviewing and editing scientific content; interpreting or connecting the knowledge more effectively, or measuring the impact of these improvements. Semi-finalists will be chosen in the first week of August by a distinguished interdisciplinary panel of judges and given the opportunity to work with a large collection of Elsevier life science content to further develop and refine their concepts.

Finalists will be announced at the end of the year after a second round of judging and invited to present vision papers to the judging panel and the public in February 2009. The first place winner will be awarded a cash prize of $35,000 while the second place innovator will receive a $15,000 prize. As an additional benefit, finalists will enjoy free access to ScienceDirect and Scopus; moreover, all contestants may be offered the opportunity to develop their tools in collaboration with Elsevier.

"The Grand Challenge provides an innovative way to spur discussion on evolving text-centred modes of research. I'm excited to serve as a panel judge, and to experience the creativity of groups interested in changing the way in which science is published" remarked Eduard Hovy, Chair Panel of Judges and Director of the Natural Language Group, Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

“The Grand Challenge is about enabling scientists to interpret research more efficiently and effectively by recognizing relationships and patterns more rapidly than is currently possible. Eventually, we hope to accelerate the course of science”, says Bernard Aleva, Elsevier’s Global Director of Publishing, Life Sciences, “One of the best aspects of the Elsevier Grand Challenge is the chance to collaborate very closely with the scientific community to move a little bit closer to this goal.”

# # #

Notes to Editors:
For more information about the awards, visit www.elseviergrandchallenge.com

About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier’s 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as ScienceDirect, MD Consult, Scopus, bibliographic databases, and online reference works.

Elsevier is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc, a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier's ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

Media Contact:
Noelle Gracy
Elsevier
+31 20 485 3029
n.gracy@elsevier.com

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