From principle to practice

Across the ten projects, what stood out to the jury was the striking diversity of disciplines represented. The projects spanned fields as varied as bioinformatics, ecology, dentistry, communication, and psychology. This range shows how Open Science principles can be translated into concrete practices tailored to different contexts – from involving citizens and communities beyond academia to making data, software, and research materials openly available and reusable, or adopting practices such as preregistration. 

The 2026 OSCAwards Winners

The following projects of the University of Amsterdam, including ACTA and Amsterdam UMC, received an OSCAward 2026:

Transparency/Metascience/Preregistration/Reproducibility 

Project AWeSoMe (Adolescents, Well-being, and Social Media)
Amber van der Wal, Ine Beyens, Rebecca Godard, Inga Vondenhof & Konrad Mikalauskas (University of Amsterdam (UvA), Amsterdam School of Communication Research)

Project AWeSoMe aims to investigate questions about the relationship between adolescents’ social media use and their well-being. Through preregistration, open workflows, and reusable analytical tools, the project aims to make their research findings transparent, reproducible, and broadly adoptable within the field.

Making Interactive Science Accessible and Reproducible: AbSolution and ENCORE
Rodrigo García-Valiente, Charisios Triantafyllou, Barbera van Schaik, Aldo Jongejan, Samuel Langton, Sabrina Pollastro, Dornatien Anang, Jeroen Guikema, Niek de Vries, Huub Hoefsloot & Antoine van Kampen (Amsterdam UMC, Bioinformatics Laboratory, Epidemiology and Data Science)

Interactive tools have transformed data analysis by making complex methods accessible, but often at the cost of reproducibility. AbSolution is an open-source application that addresses this challenge by combining a code-free interactive interface with full computational transparency through the ENCORE reproducibility framework.

Can We Really Suppress Unwanted Thoughts? What 118 Studies Reveal About Memory Control [Student project] 
Jinghan Zhao, Ilinca Ilie, Sera Wiechert & Bruno Verschuere (University of Amsterdam, Department of Psychology)

Have you ever wished you could just forget a painful memory? Scientists have been studying this for decades using a task where they test whether people can forget memories by trying to stop themselves from thinking about them. This preregistered project looked at 118 studies on this topic and investigated whether it matters how carefully the study was conducted and who co-authored the publications.

Many Analysts, Many Babies, One Phenomenon: An Exploratory Study of Infant Visual Habituation [Student project]
Arya Mallik & Hanna Nagy (University of Amsterdam, Department of Psychology)

Infant visual habituation is a crucial window into early cognitive development, yet researchers disagree on its core characteristics, explanatory theories, and methodological implementation. This project invited 25 independent analysis teams to investigate visual habituation in infancy, using a publicly available looking-time dataset from the ManyBabies Consortium, featuring data from 3,881 infants across the world.

Open educational resources/Open education/Open online courses

Podcast Net Echt 
Kris Sloot, Pam Ackermans, Aron de Jong, Peter-Paul Verbeek, Lisa Maier & Karen Kraal (University of Amsterdam, Communications Office, Faculty of Humanities, Executive Board)

Net Echt is the University of Amsterdam’s podcast that looks at films, series and pop culture through a scientific lens. The key objectives of Net Echt are to (1) make academic knowledge openly accessible to a broad, non-specialist audience through engaging audio storytelling and to (2) build bridges between disciplines, with episodes often featuring researchers from different fields who jointly analyse a film or television series.

Open Oral Radiology Education for Everyone 
Julien Issa, Gerard Sanderink & Erwin Berkhout (Academic Center for Dentistry Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam & Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Oral Radiology and Digital Dentistry)

This project provides freely accessible online learning modules in oral radiology which offers users an interactive, case-based training to improve diagnostic skills for dental students and professionals. Originally created for internal teaching, these resources have evolved into internationally used open educational tools.