Open Awards
In partnership with
The Annual UW–Madison Open Awards
The UW–Madison Open Awards are a joint initiative of the UW–Madison Libraries, the Data Science Institute, and the Open Source Program Office, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The awards recognize and celebrate those using open practices in their work and who are inspiring others to do the same. The awards also recognize that open practices vary across academic communities including: open access publishing, open data, open education, open source software and hardware, open science, and more. All of these open practices are critical to the mission of the Wisconsin Idea — enabling sharing to maximize resources and knowledge dissemination, fostering transparency, and ensuring greater impact of research outputs to the public good.
Award categories
- Open Hall of Fame: for individuals, projects, or teams whose open contributions have had lasting impacts, widespread adoption, or driven significant change for their communities during the course of their careers.
- Open Scholarship: for UW–Madison faculty and research professionals at any stage of their career who have demonstrated a significant commitment to open practices through their work.
- Open Source: for anyone in the UW–Madison community who has done significant work in open source.
Winners are selected from an annual call for nominations by the Open Awards Review Committee. Winners receive a $1,000 award, and the Hall of Fame awardees have their names displayed in the Digital Scholarship Hub located in Memorial Library.
Open Awards 2026
Celebrate open practices at the University of Wisconsin–Madison – and the faculty and staff who use them in their work – at the 2026 Open Awards.
2026 Open Awards
Thursday, October 29
3-4:30 p.m.
WARF Centennial Seminar Hub, Morgridge Hall
Opening remarks by Dorota Grejner-Brzezinska, Vice Chancellor for Research, and Remzi Arpaci-Desseau, Dean of the College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence (CAI). As well as a fireside chat panel on topics such as transparency and research integrity.
Winner’s (2026)
Open Hall of Fame inductees
- Colin Dewey, Professor of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics and Computer Science
- Tsung-Wei Huang, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
- BadgerShield
- Neotoma Paleoecology Database
Open Scholarship Award recipients
- Eric Hoyt, Professor of Communication Arts
- Latinx Talk
Open Source Award recipients
- Agricultural Forecasting Application and Maria Oros, PhD Candidate in Statistics Department
- Matt Sinclair, Professor of Computer Science (Gem5)
Learn More
Past recipients
Explore the full history of the Open Awards winners.
Nomination process
Learn how to nominate a colleague or project for the next awards cycle.