OPEN RESEARCH AWARDS
CONVERGENCE HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
APPLICATIONS HAVE CLOSED
Applications for these awards have been closed. We thank everyone that for submitting wonderful applications. Award winners will be notified in mid November.
The original announcement, evaluation procedure & criteria can be viewed below.
ANNOUNCEMENT
Are you a Master student or an Early Career Researcher working in the field of health and technology?
Do you use or do you know others who use open research practices?
Read on to find out more about and apply to these newly launched awards!
We are pleased to announce the launch of the Convergence Health and Technology Open Research Awards, aimed at researchers adopting open research practices in healthcare and technology. Open research encompasses transparency, openness, reproducibility, and replicability, which are essential principles to achieve quality research.
Pursuant to these principles, cultural change from a publish-or-perish to an open research culture is occurring, led by stakeholders such as the European Commission and the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Grassroots initiatives, such as the Open Science Communities, ReproducibiliTea, and R.I.O.T. Science Club, additionally provide training in the use of open research practices. However, a number of barriers remain to adopting and promoting open research principles in daily research activities. While implementing open research practices in one's workflow requires considerable time investments, such efforts remain largely overlooked. Researchers practicing open research, however, lead behavioural change and help keep our institutions at the forefront of research in healthcare and technology. With the Convergence Health and Technology Open Research Awards, we hope to promote behavioural change and to reward the efforts necessary for adopting and promoting open research practices in health and technology research.
We offer a total of twelve awards across Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus MC and TU Delft, for a total of 4 awards per institution. The awards will be given to two Master students and two Early Career Researchers (PhD candidates, postdocs, research assistants/associates) per institution.
Each award consists of a certificate of excellence and of a monetary reward of 100 euros.
Applications can be submitted between June 21st and August 31st. Both self-nominations and nominations of other students/researchers can be submitted. We value equity and diversity; therefore, we strongly encourage applications from underrepresented minorities (e.g. gender and ethnic minorities). Please consult our eligibility criteria (specified below) before application. Because we value transparency, we have prespecified and publicly shared our evaluation criteria (specified below). We recognise that such evaluation is mostly tailored to quantitative science and plan to extend our reach to qualitative disciplines in the upcoming years. For any questions and suggestions, please contact us at info@riotscienceNL.com.
The Convergence Health and Technology Open Research Awards are organised and offered by the Convergence Health and Technology team, the Erasmus MC Dean Prof. Van Leeuwen, Dr. Adrian Cohen, and the Rotterdam R.I.O.T. Science Club. A board of members of the R.I.O.T. Science Club, Open Science Community Rotterdam, and Open Science Community Delft have contributed to the development of these awards and will evaluate applications following the pre-specified criteria.
ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA
Applicants must meet all the following criteria to be eligible for the awards:
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For Master students, they must be currently enrolled in a masters programme at Erasmus MC, EUR or TU Delft. For Early Career Researchers, they must be PhD candidates, postdocs, or research assistants/associates based at Erasmus MC, EUR or TU Delft. Visiting researchers with an affiliation at one of the aforementioned institutions can also apply.
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They must have used one or more open research practices in their Master thesis (for Master students only) or in their research career (published or unpublished paper(s) or PhD thesis). Examples of what constitutes an open research practice are given below. Links to any supporting materials will be required for self-nominations. For nominations of others, (publicly) available evidence will be requested in the application form. If the applicant cannot provide supporting information, additional evidence will be requested to the nominee and is therefore not compulsory upon application.
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The research considered for the award falls under the Convergence Health and Technology theme (see more detailed explanation below).
Open research practices include (but are not limited to):
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Public sharing of code, hardware, materials, and/or data (e.g. on GitHub, OSF).
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Public preregistration of a study.
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Conducting a registered report.
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Publication on a preprint server (e.g. MedRxiv, BioRxiv, TechRxiv), institutional repository (e.g. RePub) or open access publishing.
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Creating or contributing to open source software or publishing a data/software paper.
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Engaging the public or service users in the research process (e.g. science communication or “citizen science” projects).
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Conducting replication studies.
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Conducting meta-research (the study of research processes).
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Using the CRediT role taxonomy to recognise diverse contributions for the recognition of contributions to a manuscript.
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Engaging in open peer review.
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Other, e.g. see https://bmkramer.databox.me/Public/Wheel_of_Open_Science/.
This list is by no means exhaustive. We will consider any practices contributing to transparent science, regardless of whether they are in this list.
Convergence Health and Technology theme
The Convergence Health and Technology theme strives for lifelong health, socioeconomic equality, prevention of mental illness, and use of precise medicine. It encompasses four key topics:
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The fundamentals of health and disease (e.g. molecular basis of life and disease)
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The improvement of health journeys (e.g. early disease detection, prevention)
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Technology-based transition in healthcare (e.g. development of technologies shaping the future of healthcare)
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Human-centered technology and artificial intelligence for health (e.g. development of novel technologies for prevention, diagnostics, cure, and care).
Disciplines included in the Convergence Health and Technology theme are outlined in the figure below:
EVALUATION CRITERIA
Evaluation procedure
After the deadline for nominations has closed, applications will be evaluated by team-members of the evaluation committee. We strive to have two team-members evaluate each application. However, depending on the number of applications received, applications could be evaluated by one team-member in a first selection round, after which the top 10 applications for each institution will be evaluated by a second team-member. The evaluation committee is composed of members of the Open Science Community Rotterdam, Open Science Community Delft, and the Rotterdam R.I.O.T. Science Club (core team only), who will respectively evaluate applications from Erasmus University Rotterdam, TU Delft, and Erasmus Medical Center.
When potential conflicts of interest arise (e.g. evaluators have a direct work-relationship with the applicant), applications will be sent to an independent evaluator within the R.I.O.T. Science Club Global Team who has no direct relationship with the applicant. Ultimately, based on the combined assessment of the first and second evaluator, the award winners will be selected. On the occasion that multiple applicants are equally qualified, equal scoring applications will be discussed among the evaluation team to determine which applications will receive the award. If the evaluation team is unable to discriminate between equal scoring applications, the award winner will be determined using a lottery system.
Evaluation criteria
Criteria upon which we award winners will be selected are specified here. Briefly, we will divide applications in seven categories (open access publishing, open data, open materials, open source soft-/hardware, open peer review, preregistration/registered reports, and other) for evaluation. A maximum of three contributions can be submitted per applicant. Each contribution can be from any of the above-specified categories: for instance, an applicant is allowed to submit multiple research outputs falling under the same category.
We base our evaluation on both quantitative measures (e.g., the number of open research practices the applicant adhered to) and qualitative measures (e.g., how well are the hypotheses specified in a preregistration). Quantitative measures will account for 20% and qualitative measures for 80% of the total evaluation. Based on the evaluation criteria a total score between 0 and 10 will be calculated.