Call for the EUR / Erasmus MC Open and Responsible Science Awards 2024

Prizes

The Open and Responsible Science program (ORS) wishes to recognize projects that include open, transparent, inclusive, and responsible scholarship practices. Fall 2024, ORS will award separate prizes to celebrate commitment to three important pillars of open science:

• Open Research
• Open Education
• Societal Engagement

The winners in each category will receive €2500 to be invested in research and educational materials.

Eligibility Criteria

Eligible projects must fulfill the following criteria:

• Carried out by academic and/or support staff employed at EUR and/or Erasmus MC at the time of submission. Examples: PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers, lecturers, assistant/associate/full professors, data stewards, software engineers.
• Projects carried out by visiting staff with EUR and/or Erasmus MC affiliation at the time of submission are also eligible.
• Demonstrable implementation of one or more open research practices in the research project or educational activity (see Examples of Open Scholarship Practices section).
• The project has not received the ORS Award in previous editions.

Submission Procedure

• Self-nominations (i.e., projects the nominees have participated in) as well as nominations of other projects are welcome.
• Submissions will be accepted from September 1st 2024.
• The submission deadline is October 1st 2024. 
• Applicants must send an email to ors.award@eur.nl, with the following information in attachment:
  • An application letter (max. one page) introducing the project, clarifying for which award it is nominated, and why the application warrants consideration.
  • An appendix (max. one page) with a short description (one paragraph) and corresponding direct links to 1 project that demonstrates the relevant open research practices (see Examples of Open Scholarship Practices section).
  • Apart from the application letter and the appendix, no further material will be considered.
• If projects are nominated by someone who was not directly involved in the work, the project team will be notified and given the opportunity to supplement their application with information that the nominator might not be aware of. This procedure aims to level the playing field by allowing all teams to present the information they deem relevant for the award.
• Teams including early-career researchers from underrepresented groups as well as research support staff are especially encouraged to apply. 
• The jury will only consider projects from the last 5 years (i.e., developed and/or published between 2020 and 2024). Projects that were not awarded any EUR-prize last year, are eligible for resubmission.

Examples of Open Scholarship Practices

Open scholarship practices include (but are not limited to): 

• Open access publication: gold, diamond, and/or green (on a preprint server, e.g. MedRxiv, BioRxiv, PsyArXiv, or institutional repository, e.g., Pure)
• Public sharing of analysis code, materials, data, and/or hardware schematics (e.g., on GitHub, EUR Data Repository, OSF)
• Public preregistration (e.g., on OSF Registries, EU Clinical Trials Register)
• Registered Report accepted at Stage I or Stage II
• Creating and/or contributing to open source software and/or publishing a data/software paper (e.g., on the Journal of Open Source Software)
• Creating and/or contributing to open educational materials (e.g., publicly available course slides, MOOCs, The Turing Way)
• Engaging the public and/or service users in the research and educational process (e.g., science communication, citizen science projects, living labs)
• Conducting “research on research” (e.g., metascience, philosophy of science)
• Engaging in open peer review, pre- or post-publication (e.g., PubPeer) 

This list is not exhaustive. We will consider any other practices that contribute to transparent and engaged scholarship.

Evaluation Procedure

The jury consists of academics and professional staff knowledgeable about various aspects of open scholarship practices.

Applications will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

• quantitative assessment, e.g., the number of open scholarship practices the project includes;
• qualitative assessment, a cursory assessment of how open scholarship practices have been implemented (e.g., whether open data are properly described to facilitate reuse, or the specificity of a preregistration).

Qualitative assessment will account for the majority of the evaluation.

Applications will be evaluated in two rounds. In the first round, each application will be evaluated by at least two jury members[1] based on the aforementioned criteria and assigned a rank. In the second round, the top 3 applications for each award will be evaluated by all jury members and the award winners will be selected. Should multiple projects be equally ranked, the winner will be selected at random.
 

[1] To avoid possible conflicts of interest, jury members with a direct work relationship with a candidate will not evaluate their submission.