Sage Bionetworks said this week that it will work with the organizers of the Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods, or DREAM, to run open computational challenges focused on scientific discovery and clinical research.
As part of the collaboration, Sage's Synapse platform will be used to share data and code during computational challenges, while DREAM's organizers will contribute expertise they've gained from running 24 contests in the last five years, the partners said.
This partnership is a continuation of an existing relationship between Sage and the DREAM project. Last summer, they worked together on one of the challenges for the seventh incarnation of DREAM, which aimed to develop algorithms for predicting breast cancer survival (BI 6/15/2012).
The partners said that the merger will enable them run several challenges similar to the breast cancer prognosis challenge yearly and provide a collaborative framework for open science.
"Traditional ways of doing science [have] researchers too focused on being the first to publish," resulting in a "culture of secrecy about scientific results and data," Gustavo Stolovitzky, founder of the DREAM project, said in a statement.
"By refocusing our efforts on creating a collaborative research environment, DREAM and Sage Bionetworks can foster a complementary way of doing science," he said.