Open Research Award 2021
The Open Research Award 2021 was the opportunity to showcase the initiatives and accomplishments of our researchers who actively engage with the tools and practices that make research more collaborative and enhance the dissemination of their findings.
The Open Research Award was presented for the first time 14th December 2021, with two Main Award prizes of €1500 and two Early Career Award prizes of €1000. The external independent judges for the award were Dr Paola Masuzzo (IGDORE, Ghent) and Dr Yasemin Turkyilmaz-van der Velden (TUDelft, Delft).
We invited Eurac researchers at any stage of their career, to consider their full research life cycles and outputs in all forms and to send nominations based on their exemplary open research achievements.
Main Award Winners
Creating networks, open-source software tools, Open Seminar Series, support for the R and Bioconductor communities in the field of high throughput omics data
Johannes Rainer, leader of the Team Computational Metabolomics team at the Institute for Biomedicine, who has established successful tools and practices for open, collaborative, and reproducible research and whose engagement in a community approach to problem solving are influencing the general attitude of data scientists at the Institute and beyond in the vast R and Bioconductor communities.
His application stood out since he strongly believes in open software and method development to ensure transparency and reproducibility, and since he continuously engages in creating networks and enhances collaboration by encouraging contributions from the community. He applies a wide range of open research practices such as open data and method sharing, developing and sharing open source R packages, and favouring reviewing articles for open peer review journals. He is also an organizer and a key figure of the Open Seminar Series (OSS), a grass-root voluntary initiative aimed at stimulating the scientific environment at the Institute for Biomedicine. In the words of his colleagues, his work is influencing heavily the general attitude of data scientists at the Institute to favour open, collaborative and reproducible research, significantly increasing the quality of the scientific output.
Read Johannes' interview and view his nomination.
Computational Linguistics and Digital Humanities - creation, curation, adaptation, and long-term preservation of language resources and tools
Andrea Abel, Lavinia Nicoleta Aparaschivei, Greta Franzini, Jennifer-Carmen Frey, Verena Lyding, Lionel Nicolas and Egon W. Stemle, aka the Language Technologies group, whose purview stretches across disciplines, languages and communities and manifests itself in the active participation and coordination of initiatives designed to bring people together, invite them to join in the research and shape best practice.
Their application stood out because of the wide embrace of open research practices, going from open access to scientific publications to open source and open data deposit, all through collaborative and transparent research venues. The use and implementation of open science practices are clearly driven not only by a deep commitment to it, but also by a distinct understanding of the benefits that can derive. In particular, the tremendous impact that derives from publishing data, computational workflows, and resources, together with a big drive for community engagement, citizen science, preservation of local resources and knowledge. Taking science out of the ivory tower seems to be the goal of the group, and open science is definitely helping them in achieving it!
Read the interview with Egon Stemle and view the Language Technologies group nomination.
Early Career Award Winners
Open Data in Open Software – MonalisR, Meteobrowser and the BolzanoR group
Giulio Genova, Institute for Alpine Environment, and Mattia Rossi, Institute for Earth Observation, who have collaboratively developed open source tools that help and enable not only researchers but also users with minimal programming skills to access and analyze meteorological and environmental data easily and efficiently.
Their application stood out because of the open-source tools they develop and their community building and engagement efforts. They developed the MonalisR package and the Meteo Browser web application to help researchers to quickly access analysis-ready data from diverse data sources, by lowering complexity in accessing and importing the data. Moreover, they established the Bolzano R community, to facilitate connection between local R-developers and R-users, and they organize R meetups. They also created a website for this community which gives all the participants the possibility to create blog posts, disseminate the activities and list software packages and publications.
Read Giulio and Mattia's interview and view their nomination.
Adopting an ALL OPEN research culture in freshwater biomonitoring and biodiversity research
Alberto Scotti, Institute of Alpine Environment, whose research on aquatic insects as sentinels of environmental changes has been done following the ideal of the open research culture and the aim of sharing every research output.
His application stood out since he has a very clear vision and motivation about open research, collaboration, and transparency and aims to increase the Open Research Culture in his community. He applies his vision in practice by publishing open access papers, sharing datasets publicly, publishing data papers to enhance reusability of data and making his code for statistical analysis openly available for others to follow and reproduce step-by-step entire analyses. As an early career Open Research champion in his community, he is a go-to person for his colleagues for questions about best practices such as how to share data, how to prepare data for publications and how to publish data papers.
Read Alberto's interview and view his nomination.
Biodiversity Monitoring South Tyrol - database & collaborations to make biodiversity data available to a broader public, by Julia Strobl, Chiara Paniccia & Andreas Hilpold
Openness within the Regional Energy Modelling project - mathematical models to study the evolution of the energy system, by Matteo Giacomo Prina, Roberto Vaccaro, David Moser & Wolfram Sparber
Re-establishment of an open-access cryosphere data monitoring in Central Asia - project "Snowline4DailyWater", by Martina Barandun
The Environmental Data Platform (EDP): a collaborative platform inspired by the FAIR principles, by Roberto Monsorno, Armin Costa, Simone Tritini, Andrea Vianello, Alex Jacob, Michele Claus, Mattia Rossi, Bartolomeo Ventura & Peter Zellner
2CAP-Energy Atlas, an open-source tool that allows users to develop appropriate technologies for plus energy buildings, by Daniele Antonucci and Andrea Vianello
Other nominations
Useful Links
Liise Lethsalu and Maria Bellantone at the Research Support Office will answer your questions about Open Access and RDM, including training requests, questions about funders’ and journals’ policies, internal and external funding for Open Access and the Open Research Award. The Research Support Office can also be contacted for more information about the Open Access and the Research Data Management Working Groups in Eurac Research.
For questions about the current research information system Converis and the institutional repository BIA, please contact Antje Messerschmidt at the Library.