Genome Center researchers help win 'Open Data' award for work on Assemblathon 2

Ian Korf, Keith Bradnam, and Joseph Fass helped lead the Assemblathon 2 contest that assessed state-of-the-art methods in the field of genome assembly. In recognition of the very openness in which the research was conducted, all of the 91 authors of the Assemblathon 2 paper were jointly awarded the 2013 BioMed Central Award for Open Data (sponsored by Lab Archives). The award is defined as:

This award recognizes institutions which have done most to show leadership in taking steps to expand access to the published results of scholarly research.

The openness of this publication was reflected by choosing to publish an early pre-print on the arXiv.org pre-print server, publishing code used in the project to GitHub, and publishing all data (including genome assemblies) as citable datasets in the GigaDB database.