Highlighted Projects
UW-Madison is home to a vibrant, rapidly growing ecosystem of open source practitioners. From students writing their first lines of code to researchers developing foundational tools like R and HTCondor, our community’s impact is global. The university’s open source landscape thrives through the diverse contributions of faculty, staff, and students across campus. Explore the incredible scale of open source activity at UW-Madison, learn from our community survey, and discover the projects that are shaping the future of collaborative innovation.
The UW-Madison Open Awards
The annual Open Awards recognize and celebrate UW-Madison faculty, staff, students, and projects who are advancing open practices — including open source software, open data, open access publishing, open education, and open science — and inspiring others to do the same.
Celebrating Our Ecosystem
R
A free software environment for statistical computing and graphics that has become a foundational tool in the global scientific community for data-driven research.
HTCondor
A workload management system that creates high-throughput computing environments by harnessing networked computers to solve massive computational problems.
ImageJ
The world’s most widely used open-source software for biological image analysis, powering advanced research in medicine and biology.
BadgerShield
An open-source medical face shield design that protected millions of healthcare workers globally during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Carpentries
A global community teaching foundational coding and data science skills to researchers, bridging the gap between research and modern computation.
Tiny Earth Project
Engages students worldwide in searching for new antibiotics from soil samples to combat the global health crisis of antibiotic resistance.
Open Source Seeds
Protects the freedom to use, save, and share seeds to ensure plant genetic diversity remains a public resource for a sustainable food system.
CSPP
Provides open-source software for real-time processing of meteorological satellite data, enabling global environmental monitoring.
Environmental Data Initiative
Preserves and archives environmental data to ensure its availability for trackable long-term ecological synthesis and research.
gem5
A vital modular simulation platform used in academia and industry to design and test new computer architectures for performance and efficiency.
pyhf
A Python-based tool used in high-energy physics to perform statistical analysis and search for new physical phenomena with high accuracy.
qtl
An R package providing specialized tools for mapping genetic variations and understanding the hereditary basis of biological characteristics.
JuliaPhylo
A software ecosystem for the Julia language providing tools for studying the evolutionary history and relationships between species.
Missing Project?
If you are working on an open source project at UW that you would like to see here, let us know! We want to highlight all of the amazing work the university supports.