
Participate to the OpenAIRE AI Hackathon - Powered by Alien Intelligence.
At a glance
A 12-week open science build challenge co-organised by OpenAIRE and Alien Intelligence. Open to researchers, technologists, and end-users. Participants explore the OpenAIRE Graph via the OpenAIRE MCP plugged into Alien's AI Gateway, and contribute artifacts - code, methodologies, applied case studies, conversations - that turn open science into insight.
Hackathon dates
- Launch date: 02nd June, 2026
- Submission deadline: 20th August, 2026 (23:59 CET)
- Review of submissions: August → early September 2026
- Announcement of awards: Wednesday 16th September 2026, hosted at an OpenAIRE event (OpenAIRE Community Call Graph)
A hackathon open to
Solo participants, research teams, startups, established companies, or interdisciplinary collectives. Based in Europe or collaborating with European partners is preferred but not required.
Domain researchers
Any researcher working on biology, social sciences, humanities, climate, etc. No AI / coding background needed.
End-users
Policy makers, librarians, journalists, educators, business analysts.
Tech-savvy builders
Developers, AI/ML engineers, research engineers.
Four themes to select from
All themes cover community needs aligned with latest topics on AI and open science.
- Theme A: Explore and Narrate
Description: Pick a topic you care about and let the OpenAIRE Graph tell you something new about it. Follow the trail of papers, authors, datasets, and funding until a story emerges — then share it. Your artifact can be a documented conversation, a case study, a visual essay, or a structured write-up. No coding required. The insight is the contribution.
Ideal for: Domain researchers, educators
- Theme B: Build
Description: Create something that makes the OpenAIRE Graph more useful. A tool, an app, an agent, a workflow, an integration with another data source - if it extends what people can do with open science data, it belongs here. You define the problem and the audience. We want to see something that works and that others can reuse or build on.
Ideal for: Developers, AI/ML engineers, research engineers
- Theme C: Analyse
Description: Use the OpenAIRE Graph to produce evidence. Map a research field, track funding flows, identify gaps, benchmark outputs, or support a policy argument with data. Your artifact should answer a real question and be clear enough that a decision-maker could act on it. Reproducibility and transparency in your method are a plus.
Ideal for: Policy makers, scientometricians, business analysts
- Theme D: Wildcard
Description: Cross-disciplinary, experimental, playful, or genuinely strange — if it uses the OpenAIRE Graph and you can't find another theme that fits, this is yours. The only rule is that it has to be interesting.
Ideal for: Anyone
Submission model
What is expected to deliver
The artifact can be anything that demonstrates value:
- Code, notebook, app, dashboard
- Methodology document, protocol, workflow recipe
- Integration combining OpenAIRE Graph with other tools
- Applied case study in a specific scientific or business field
The story is a 1-2 page write-up explaining: the question, the journey, the insight, and what others can reuse.
We expect the materials to be available under a CC-BY license.
The submission period is closed!
Get to know the applications submitted and vote for community's favorite.
View the applications
01-OpenAIRE Evidence Ledger
OpenAIRE Evidence Ledger is a small, dependency-free Python tool that turns an OpenAIRE Graph search into a human-reviewed evidence pack. It is for researchers, public-sector innovation teams and open-science practitioners who need a shortlist they can inspect rather than a fluent answer whose factual boundary is unclear.
02-OpenAIRE Graph Evaluator
Raw scholarly metadata is noisy and unclassified. Training AI tools that distinguish a methodology paper from a dataset paper from a review requires labelled data, and hand-labelling thousands of papers is slow, expensive and hard to scale across disciplines. We built a complete feedback loop that turns the OpenAIRE Graph, a vast but unlabelled index of research outputs, into validated training data for AI classifiers, at scale and with minimal human effort.
03-ScholarMind
ScholarMind is an AI-based research and knowledge management system designed to help researchers organize, connect, search, and reuse scientific knowledge. It provides a structured environment for managing research information and developing research memory rather than treating scientific papers as isolated documents.
04-From Mathematical Reasoning to Algorithmic Judgment
What research connections—and gaps—link mathematical and model-based reasoning with AI literacy, particularly in relation to interpretation, uncertainty, evaluation, and judgment? The question matters because AI literacy frameworks increasingly require people to “critically evaluate” AI, yet this phrase does not by itself specify the cognitive operations involved when an AI output is uncertain, probabilistic, or potentially wrong. The exploration therefore examined whether AI literacy research already connects to the traditions that study reasoning under uncertainty and to empirical research on when humans appropriately rely on, override, or reject AI advice.
05-Replication Radar
Replication Radar answers that on the OpenAIRE Graph. Search a field and, for each high-impact claim, it shows whether anyone has independently proven it: a signed Science Live replication verdict (validated / contested / refuted), read live from the nanopublication network, author-agnostic. Where the Graph knows only cited / not-cited, the Radar adds checked / not-checked.
06-OpenPhys V2
OpenPhys V2 is an agent-driven, open-source computational physics engine that solves Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) using Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). Traditional numerical PDE solvers (FEM/FDM) require deep domain expertise, manual mesh generation, and rigid code bases. Conversely, standard machine learning approaches lack physical grounding and academic context.
07-Data Footprints
Data Footprints is a reusable analytical workflow and interactive application that uses the OpenAIRE Graph to make dataset citation pathways visible and interpretable for responsible research assessment. Starting from a researcher’s ORCID, the application discovers their datasets through the OpenAIRE MCP connector powered by Alien Intelligence, validates authorship, reconciles multiple records that may refer to the same conceptual dataset, and traces publications that cite those datasets through OpenAIRE Graph API V3. It then compares the dataset creators with the authors of each citing publication.
08-Open Quantum Evidence Atlas
Funders can count grants and publications. Can they also trace the public evidence to datasets and software, identify which persistent links are missing, and measure whether those links improve over time? Open Quantum Evidence Atlas is a working, no-login Evidence Chain Auditor for funders, programme managers and Open Science teams. It answers one operational question: after research is funded and published, can the public evidence be followed to datasets and software—and which persistent links must be fixed when it cannot?
09-DARKON-BIORIX: D-RectifyL v3.0
The full meaning of D-RectifyL is Deterministic Rectification Layer; an interactive, open-source tool that folds any protein or DNA sequence in microseconds using a physics framework derived entirely from open-access Zenodo preprints indexed in the OpenAIRE Graph and the EOSC community. Its a single-cell Google Colab application with a widget interface. The user types any UniProt accession, gene name, or raw sequence. The tool fetches live biological data from UniProt, queries the OpenAIRE Graph for the underlying physics corpus, and returns: the dominant phosphorylation site (the e₄ snap node), fold class, PTM site ranking, OZIP 8-component state, speed benchmarks, and a full biological identity card — all in under 30 milliseconds.
10-Sophia in the Graph
The question was motivated by a simple problem: “the future of work” is not a single research field. It cuts across economics, sociology, management, technology, labour studies, organisational research, public policy and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. A conventional literature search can retrieve relevant publications, but it is much harder to understand how these publications are connected, which themes are emerging, which researchers and organisations shape the field, and how research priorities change over time. We therefore asked whether the OpenAIRE Graph, accessed through the Alien Intelligence MCP connector, could be used not merely to find papers, but to explore the structure and evolution of a research landscape and turn the resulting evidence into an intelligible research narrative.
11-OpenGap
OpenGap is an evidence-first web application that helps researchers move from a broad research idea to an inspectable potential-gap hypothesis. Instead of returning another long list of papers, it compares several kinds of research activity available through the OpenAIRE Graph — publications, funded projects, software and datasets — and surfaces simple structural imbalances that may deserve deeper investigation.
12-Reproducibility Bench
Empirical finance contains thousands of published claims about how prices move. A person testing them on a private dataset normally chooses which claims to test, often with some intuition about what the data may say. The result can look like an independent test while behaving like a search for a convenient result. We asked whether a public research graph could make that choice explicit and auditable.
Vote for your favorite submission
Read the publicly available information about the applications and vote for your favorite one!
Awards
| Tier | Selection | Award |
|---|---|---|
Tier 1 - Grand prize | 1 standout project |
|
Tier 2 - Theme winners | 4 winners (one per theme) |
|
Tier 3 - Finalists | ~12 finalists across themes |
|
Community Choice | Most voted submission |
|
Timeline
The detailed information with dates that applicants can submit their applications follows.
-
02 June 2026 | Applications Open
• Announcement of the hackathon. Access to OpenAIRE Graph - via-Alien MCP server is granted on a rolling basis, accompanied by quick-start guides -
05 June 2026 | Onboarding webinar
• Introductory call online 12:00-13:00 CET -
12 June 2026 | Open Office session
• Drop in and ask questions 10:00-11:00 CET -
3 July 2026 | Open Office session
• Drop in and ask questions 10:00-11:00 CET -
23 July 2026 | Open Office session
• Drop in and ask questions 10:00-11:00 CET -
20 August 2026 | Applications Close
• Closure of the applications submission at 23:59 CET -
21 Aug. - 11 th September | Community Voting
• Community vote for the favourite application - 20 August - 14th September 2026 | Evaluation
- Evaluators review the applications
- Finalists announced
- 16 September 2026 | Awards
- Awards announced at the OpenAIRE Graph Community Call
- All winners present live