The Open Science Micro-Grants Scheme supports researchers at the University of St. Gallen in taking concrete, practical steps toward more open and reproducible research. Designed to lower time and resource barriers, the scheme provides targeted funding for clearly defined improvements such as first-time preregistration, preparing and sharing data or code, developing reproducibility packages, or integrating Citizen Science elements into research projects.
This grant scheme is currently in a pilot phase funded by swissuniversities.
The grant is intended to fund projects and activities for up to 12 months that go beyond applicants’ regular research, teaching, or dissemination activities and that produce a clearly defined open science (OS) output. Funded projects should contribute to making research processes, data, code, methods, teaching materials, or research findings more accessible, reusable, and transparent.
Applications are open to academic academic employees at HSG who are engaged in research and are employed at HSG for the full duration of the proposed project. Applicants must hold an employment contract of at least 50% at HSG.
The current funding round is closed. You can read about the funded projects from the 2026 cycle further down on this page. If you want to stay informed about upcoming opportunities, follow us on LinkedIn.
Reach out to André Walter or Sabou Rani Stocker at openscience@unisg.ch.
Prof. Dr. Désirée Klingler
Law School, School of Law and Economics
What kind of AI systems do public authorities buy, and what criteria do they use? How much AI procurement activity is there? And which authorities are buying AI?
This project aims to answer these questions by building an open dataset of AI-related public tenders in Switzerland and the EU. Alongside the data, this project shares exactly how cases were searched, selected and coded, so that other authorities, scholars, and practitioners can check, reuse and build on the work.
Michael Ohlinger, Prof. Dr. Tobias Ebert
Institute of Behavioral Science and Technology
Researchers studying how people choose where to live often need images of neighborhoods, but there is no shared, tested set to draw on. This project plans to create such an image collection and make it openly available. The process for creating and testing the images will be shared too, so others can reuse the method for their own research.
Dr. Ruben Laukenmann
Institute of Behavioral Science and Technology
Data on prejudice at the regional level is widely used in research, but currently available data comes almost exclusively from the US. This project aims to make code publicly available for generating crosswalks across the last two decades that enable the regional aggregation of prejudice data in the UK and Germany while preserving participants’ anonymity. The code can be used to match prejudice data from Project Implicit to regional-level information but also for other datasets that contain participants’ regional identifiers.
Dr. Marie-Luise Matthys
Institute for International Management and Diversity Management (IIMD-HSG), Competence Centre for Education and Social Transformation
Research projects often aim to involve local communities, but participants rarely get a real say in what is studied. This project tests a focus group method with farmers in six African countries to give them a voice in shaping the research. The aim is to turn the experience into an openly available toolkit that other researchers can use in their own projects.
Authors
Matteo Carabelli, Prof. Dr. Charlotta Sirén, Prof. Dr. Silvia Stroe
Institute of Responsible Innovation, Sustainability and Energy
Plenty is known about corporations investing in climate start-ups, but much less about whether they actually buy and use their technology. This project traces these business relationships through the client logos start-ups show on their websites. The resulting database and the tools used to build it are set to be shared openly, so other researchers can use them or apply the approach to other industries.
This project is part of the doctoral research within DREAM+PLAN, an MSCA doctoral programme co-funded by SERI that brings together 32 PhD researchers across Europe working towards climate-positive futures.
Authors
Dr. Ismail El Fassi, Nicolas Rudolf
Institute for Accounting, Controlling and Auditing
Companies are starting to use AI as advisors on decisions about executives, such as bonuses or promotions. This project explores whether these AI tools reduce, reinforce or reverse demographic bias. All study plans are published before the research begins, and the materials, data and code are planned to be shared openly so that others can check the results and repeat the study.
Authors
Dr. Stefan T. Siegel
Institute of Business Education and Educational Management
What actually works when it comes to creating, organising, and sharing notes and knowledge for learning and teaching? This upcoming study guide takes a closer look at popular but misleading myths on the topic. With the grant, the book is planned to be freely available online from day one, together with resources for students, lecturers and knowledge workers that they can adapt and reuse.
This project is part of the international and interdisciplinary research and practice project notelab. Developing Ideas through Evidence-informed Note-Making.