Entries to this year’s GW4 Open Research Prize, celebrating best practice in open research, are now open!
The GW4 Alliance welcomes entries for its 2026 Open Research Prize, calling for submissions that champion transparency, accessibility and reproducibility in research.
The prize is a highlight of the third annual GW4 Open Research Week, which unites four leading UK universities—Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter—to showcase best practice in open research.
This year’s awards celebrate projects that embed open practices throughout the research process, ensuring work is more accessible, transparent and reproducible. New categories have been introduced to recognise contributions at every career stage, with £250 in vouchers awarded to the top entry in each.
This year’s categories are:
- GW4 Open Research Prize: Open to all individuals and teams who have utilised Open Research practices and principles within a research project or initiative.
- GW4 Open Research Prize for Early Career Researchers: Open to individuals who consider themselves Early Career Researchers and have demonstrated individual contributions to open research practices and principles within the research process.
- GW4 Open Research Prize for Research Enablers: Open to individuals or teams who support the creation, gathering, analysis, or openness of research. Research Enablers will generally be professional research support staff who do not hold a post-doctoral position, early career fellowship, lectureships/assistant professorship, tenured position or equivalent.
A panel of judges will assess each entry using the same core criteria, with weightings tailored to each category’s focus.
GW4 Alliance Director, Melanie Knetsch said: “The GW4 Open Research Prize is a fantastic opportunity for colleagues across the GW4 Alliance to showcase the ways in which they champion the principles of open research and collaboration throughout their work. By embracing open research practices, we are continuing to foster a culture in which knowledge is shared freely, discoveries are accelerated, and the benefits of research extend further across society.”
Last year’s GW4 Open Research Prize received a wide array of entries, with recognised projects ranging from climate-science data infrastructure to cultural-heritage access and from healthcare simulation to paleoclimate studies. The winning entries included OpenGHG, a community platform for greenhouse-gas data science improving transparency and national emissions estimates — and GLAM‑E Lab, which develops legal frameworks and open-access strategies to make cultural-heritage collections more widely available.
Runners-up addressed diverse challenges: improving reproducibility in healthcare simulation; advancing paleoclimate research via Miocene temperature data; exploring DNA methylation in disease risk; enabling open pharmaceutical-monitoring via water-fingerprinting; founding a community-led open-access journal in geochemistry; and simulating indoor viral transmission to inform public health and architectural planning.
Shortlisted entrants for the 2026 Prize will be invited to join a virtual awards ceremony, which will take place during GW4 Open Research Week (20-24 April 2026).
The deadline for submissions is Friday 20 February 2026 at 5pm. For more information on submission criteria and for details on how to apply, please see the GW4 Open Research Prize webpages.
The GW4 Open Research Prize is a fantastic opportunity for colleagues across the GW4 Alliance to showcase the ways in which they champion the principles of open research and collaboration throughout their work. By embracing open research practices, we are continuing to foster a culture in which knowledge is shared freely, discoveries are accelerated, and the benefits of research extend further across society.”
GW4 Open Research Week 2026
The third annual GW4 Open Research Week returns from 20–24 April 2026, with Cardiff University taking the lead this year. The week-long celebration will showcase the many ways open research practices make scholarship more accessible, transparent, reproducible and visible.
A packed programme of online events will welcome GW4 academics, staff and researchers, offering practical insights and real-world examples of how to embed open practices across the community.
Full details will be announced the end of January, so keep an eye on the GW4 Open Research Week webpages. In the meantime, you can catch up on highlights from last year’s sessions via GW4’s YouTube channel.
