TU Delft Open Science Programme 2020-2024 Research and Education in the Open Era: Evaluation 2022 & Work plan 2023

The year 2023 will be the last of a four-year Open Science Programme. It raises the question of what we learned from the existing programme, whether we need a continuation to achieve the mission, and if we want to use the same setup or approach.

The current OSP assumes that three cross-cutting themes provide the glue that binds the seven projects together.
Additionally, the projects have, in some cases, more substantial dependencies with activities and projects outside than inside the OSP. That observation may call for a radically different setup and even question whether a follow-up OSP is the right approach. However, several national developments make such a follow-up perfect sense:
• establishing a council of Chiefs-of-Open-Science;
• transitioning from NPOS to NWO ‘regie-orgaan’;
• an increased prospect of government funding for open science and open education.
It is in the strategic interest of TU Delft to have a balanced, effective, and well-communicated set of activities that advance open science at its faculties. To emphasise that this is not a new effort, we suggest calling this programme Open Science NEXT.

We’ll still create actively links between the various projects in the OSP. However, we can also find such links at each of our faculties. In their work, they need to apply the principles of open science in all dimensions of education and research. In the last year of the Open Science Programme, we will investigate more than before how to reach out to local research and teaching programmes.

In the last year we learned that some of our most dedicated open science colleagues are slowed down in their best practices by the investments in infrastructure that TU Delft made in the past. Also open science efforts are not always recognised in TU Delft evaluation processes for hiring, tenure and promotion.

The main goals for this year and beyond are:
• To emphasise explicitly that ‘open’ becomes the new ‘normal’;
• To acknowledge that there are internal obstacles that we need to resolve;
• To embrace a policy that all future investments and purchases of software and systems facilitate seamless open teaching and research practices.