The Open Science Prize was established with the following objectives: first, to encourage the crowdsourcing of open data to make breakthroughs that are of biomedical significance; second, to illustrate that funders can indeed work together when scientific interests are aligned; and finally, to encourage international collaboration between investigators with the intent of achieving important innovations that would not be possible otherwise. The process for running the competition and the successes and challenges that arose are presented.

Wellcome requires grantees to submit and maintain an Outputs Management Plan, the quality of which have improved over time. • To stimulate re-use of data, the Wellcome Data Re-use Prizes were launched in 2018. • The Wellcome prizes did not receive the volume of submissions expected, one possible reason being the lack of clarity about the time required to produce a worthy entry.• Researchers identify publishers as the source relied upon to make data open, and there are steps publishers can take to help.• However, there is also a role for funders to unlock the potential of data.

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