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OpenSource@Stanford

Open Source Software Prize

The Stanford Open Source Software Prize is a prize awarded to an open source software project that makes noteworthy contributions to the advancement of open source software development as scholarly work, demonstrates expertise and significant impact on research in its field, and acts as an exemplary model of open source best practices.

Alpaca

2026 Prize Winner

Alpaca is an open source project that builds capable instruction-following AI models efficiently and affordably using innovative fine-tuning techniques. It notably democratized AI development by achieving capabilities with reduced training costs and computational requirements, and advanced open research by providing the community with transparent methods, tools, and documentation. In addition to gaining widespread recognition (30k+ GitHub stars), it has spawned other notable AI projects like Vicuna (Berkeley), Dolly (Databricks), GPT4All (Nomic AI)

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Solar Data Tools

2026 Prize Winner

Solar Data Tools is an open source Python library developed by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy for automated analysis and quality control of solar PV (photovoltaic) system data. It supports the PV Fleet Data Initiative at the U.S. Department of Energy and National Laboratory of the Rockies, working with industry to shed light on solar power productivity across the country, and demonstrates exemplary open source and open science best practices - including a software paper in the Journal of Open Source Software.

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OpenSource@Stanford Community Prize

2026 Winners

  • Malcolm Barrett, Research Software Engineer for Open Science Rigor & Reproducibility Software (Health Policy Data Science Lab)
  • Alex Koufos, Research Software Engineer (Solar Observatories Group - Hansen Experimental Physics Lab) Steering Committee (US Research Software Engineer Association)
Woman working in laser lab
Peter Wegner, ''Monument to Change as It Changes"

Eligibility

To be considered for the Stanford Open Source Software Prize, the project must be included in the OpenSource@Stanford Projects Registry.

If you would like to add your project to the registry or amend an existing project, please contact the Technical Community Manager (Francesca Vera) with relevant information.

Consideration for the 2027 Prize will open next Spring.

(Note that we are currently focused on open source software intrinsic to research and scholarship, rather than administrative projects.)

Recognition

The prize will be awarded on a project-basis, with the winning project's team receiving:

  • Prize assertions to the ORCID records of contributing team members
  • A small accompanying cash prize
  • Recognition as the winners of the Stanford Open Source Software Prize

Past Winners

HELM (Holistic Evaluation of Language Models)

2025 Prize Winner

HELM is an open source Python framework under the Center for Research on Foundation Models for holistic, reproducible, and transparent evaluation of foundation models. It currently maintains 17 leaderboards and evaluates dozens of LLMs on technical capabilities, a diverse range of applications, and multiple languages and language aspects. Evaluation of LLMs is increasingly relevant in industry, policy, academia, and broader society, and this is embodied by HELM's remarkable adoption and large contributor base.

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FlashAttention

2024 Prize Winner

FlashAttention is an algorithm that speeds up attention and reduces memory footprint to improve the efficiency of Transfomer models. The development of this algorithm is particularly impactful as the context length of large language models (LLMs) continues to scale up, and there has been a remarkable adoption of FlashAttention across industry as a result. The latest version, FlashAttention-2, was released in July 2023 to great excitement in scholarship and industry.

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DADA2 (Divisive Amplicon Denoising Algorithm)

2025 Prize Winner

DADA2 is an open source R package for characterizing microbial communities, with applications for understanding the microbiome and human health. It has spawned many downstream projects: 25,000+ paper citations, 735 verified software package, 26 patent citations. When challenged on replicability on review, the project PI made all data available in Stanford Digital Repository and expanded study cohort; successful replications followed.

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Generalized Random Forests (GRF)

2024 Prize Winner

Generalized Random Forests (GRF) is a R package for forest-based statistical estimation and inference. In addition to providing methods for causal effect estimation, it provides a framework to create forests for new statistical tasks. GRF has demonstrated exceptional scholarly impact and acts as an exemplary model of open source best practices, including licensing, documentation, organization, and community management.

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OpenSource@Stanford Community Prize

2025 Winners

  • James Douglass - Software Architect, Natural Capital Project
  • Fatima Pardo - Basic Life Research Scientist, Structural Biology