Jonathan Eisen, a professor at the University of California, Davis, was awarded the 10th Annual Benjamin Franklin Award at the Bio-IT World conference held in Boston this week.
The award is presented annually by the Bioinformatics Organization to an individual who has, in his or her practice, promoted open access to the materials and methods used in the life sciences.
Eisen is the academic editor-in-chief of PLoS Biology and opines on open access publishing and open data sharing on his blog, "The Tree of Life."
He has been involved with many freely available software packages such as AMPHORA and PhyloOTU as well as a new open-data sharing tool for scientists called BioTorrents.
Eisen's brother Michael, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and a co-founder of the Public Library of Science, was the recipient of the first Benjamin Franklin award in 2002.