91Ö±²¥

The Open Research Prize recognises and celebrates the excellent work University of 91Ö±²¥ researchers are doing to make their research discoverable and reusable by a wider audience. 

Open practices strive to make the processes and outputs of research transparent and freely accessible whenever possible, and are crucial to ensuring the integrity and reliability of research. Open research also supports impact activities and allows the wider public to benefit from research. 

Applicants are asked to demonstrate their engagement in open research in one or more of the following areas:

• Publishing research outputs (including data, software, protocols, monographs...) using open licences to promote broad dissemination;
• Participating in new open publication and peer review models - for example, by posting preprints, publishing in a journal which uses open peer review, formally pre-registering a study design, or publishing a ;
• Reusing existing open research outputs and repurposing these using open methods;
• Teaching open research practices or advocating for open research in the community;
• Using open and participatory methods including open notebooks, co-production, participatory action research and citizen science;
• Disseminating research using accessible outputs such as blogposts, podcasts, animations, infographics, interactive applications and more.

The Prize

Two individual first prizes of £500 - in a staff category and a PGR category - and a team first prize of £1000 (to be distributed evenly among team members) will be awarded, as well as up to five individual runner up prizes of £200. We will also publicise your project and its open research dimensions via a range of channels.  Additionally, prize winners will also have the opportunity to contribute a short case study for the University’s Open Research webpages and to speak about their work at OpenFest 2025, the University’s flagship Open Research event.

Applying

This competition is open to all researchers at the University of 91Ö±²¥, including PGR students, and to staff in research-related roles. We strongly encourage applications from researchers from a diverse range of backgrounds, identities and communities.

Applicants are asked to write a short (750 words max) case study describing in detail how they have engaged with open research, the challenges they have faced and the impact of their work. Judges will be looking for researchers to have engaged thoughtfully with open research and where appropriate met the  principles and included persistent identifiers (e.g. DOIs) for any resources mentioned.

This year, we particularly encourage applications from the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences as well as research institutes such as the AMRC. We are also keen to see applications relating to the sharing of more diverse forms of open materials, including non-traditional outputs such as workflows, data dictionaries, and artistic outputs.

We encourage projects which:

• Showcase an open research practice or practices (note, projects which focus on a single element are encouraged)
• Could be used as templates or examples for other researchers, particularly where open research is not yet widely the norm in your discipline or field (note, projects do not have to be relevant to researchers in all disciplines to be eligible)
• Engage with open research standards such as DOIs, FAIR and/or CARE data principles, 
• Share details of the challenges and obstacles that were encountered during efforts to make research open, and how these were addressed or overcome
• Are of a size/ambition relevant for the career stage of the researcher 

To enter the Open Research Prize, please complete this , including your case study and ORCID. The deadline for applications is 5pm on Wednesday 28th May 2025, with the winners announced in early July. If you have any questions, please contact oaenquiries@sheffield.ac.uk . 

The panel

The judging panel will consist of:

• Prof John Flint (Chair), Deputy Vice-President for Research
• Prof Stephen Pinfield, Information School
• Dr Amber Copeland, School of Psychology
• Dr Will Furnass, Research IT
• Dr Holly Ranger, Head of Open Research, University Library

You can view the judging criteria .

Examples and Case Studies

Open research varies significantly across the disciplines, so the examples and case studies below are intended to provide inspiration and not to be an exhaustive list. The types of open research practices you could describe in your application include:

• A study you have pre-registered and then published which may have had negative or non-significant results.
• Software you have developed, released under an open licence and which has been re-used by others.
• An open monograph you have published, including a description of any challenges you may have faced.
• A project which used participatory methods to open up the research design, methods and/or data collection to participants’ perspectives, knowledge and experiences.
• A practice-based research project which you were able to document and openly preserve aspects from, in order to increase its wider accessibility.
• A dataset you have shared publicly with extensive metadata to support others re-using it, demonstrating engagement with the FAIR principles.
• A protocol you have developed and shared publicly to enable others to re-use it.
• An output or range of outputs via which you sought to communicate your research findings to a broader range of audiences than those of more conventional research outputs.
• Engagement or teaching activities you have run within your disciplinary community to promote open research to others.

Details of case studies provided by previous winners of this prize can be found here: /openresearch/casestudies#open-research-case-studies