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 faculty and research professionals at any stage of their career who have demonstrated leadership and commitment to open practices.
- Open Source: for outstanding contributions to 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.
Last year’s winners (2025)
Open Hall of Fame inductees
- Doug Bates, Emeritus Professor of Statistics
- Karl Broman, Professor of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics
- Kevin Eliceiri, RRF Walter H. Helmerich Professor of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering
- Matthew Feickert, Data Science Institute Research Scientist
- Morton Ann Gernsbacher, Vilas Research Professor and Sir Frederic C. Bartlett Professor of Psychology
- Corinna Gries, Center for Limnology Distinguished Scientist
- Miron Livny and the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC)
- Sarah Stevens and The Carpentries community
- Open Source Seed Initiative Founders: Irwin Goldman and Jack Kloppenburg
- NASA Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences (HAQAST) Team: Tracey Holloway and Jenny Bratburd
- The JuliaPhylo Team: Cécile Ané, Claudia Solís-Lemus, Joshua Justison, Nathan Kolbow, and Benjamin Teo
- The Tiny Earth Project: Sarah Miller
- SSEC Community Satellite Processing Package (CSPP)
Open Scholarship Award recipients
- James E. Pustejovsky, Associate Professor of Educational Psychology
- Ryan Jacobs, Materials Science & Engineering Research Scientist
Open Source Award recipients
- Rich Townsend, Professor of Astronomy (GYRE)
- Tyler Caraza-Harter, Faculty Associate in Computer Sciences (OpenLambda)
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.