Member Spotlight: Collaboration & Stewardship Across the Research Lifecycle at VU

The following blog is based on a recent webinar with Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. You can watch the full recording here.

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) is advancing open science by building coordinated support for their research community through an integrated model that connects infrastructure, training, and policy development.

At VU, this approach brings together librarians, data stewards, and systems managers to address both routine research support needs and complex regulatory challenges like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance for sensitive human subjects data.

Building a Community-Centered Open Science Program

VU’s Open Science Coordinator, Sander Bosch, shared how the institution frames open science through UNESCO’s recommendations:

“Open science aims to make scientific knowledge openly available, accessible, and reusable, relating strongly to the core academic value of quality and integrity. But next to that… we want to increase scientific collaborations and sharing of information for the benefit of science and society, to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to open these processes beyond the traditional scientific community— so, collective benefit.”

As Bosch explained, VU has operationalized its open science values through campus-wide branding, including large posters and a consistent visual identity, to make communication about open science more coherent and visible.

VU’s open science program works across five key areas: infrastructure, support and training, community engagement, recognition and rewards, and policy development. This includes tools like the Open Science Framework (OSF), which researchers use alongside platforms such as Yoda and DMPonline to facilitate planning, collaboration, and long-term data management. 

VU’s research data management tools span the entire research lifecycle.

The institution also built the Network Research Data Support (NeRDS) community, which connects data stewards and experts across faculties, and participates in The Carpentries, an international community that helps researchers build foundational computational and data skills.

Measuring Progress and Providing Resources

As part of VU’s OSF Institutions membership, research support staff have access to a dashboard showing detailed metrics on their community's research activity. Kirianne Goossen, Research Data Management Application Manager, noted that since joining OSFI in 2021, more than 1,200 researchers have created over 800 projects and 150 preprints on the platform.

"OSF is one of the largest tools used at VU, with the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Behavior and Movement Science as the biggest user groups," Goossen shared.

At VU, faculty OSF adoption is strongest in the Faculty of Science.

The RDM team also offers ongoing workshops for new users and provides tools to help researchers select appropriate storage and data management solutions. Their data storage finder helps researchers determine which applications are most suitable based on data classification (from low to very high), sharing intentions, data volume requirements, and special features like high-performance computing needs.

Navigating Faculty-Level Complexities

Jessica Hrudey, Research Data Steward in the Faculty of Behavioral and Movement Sciences, described how open science practices intersect with discipline-specific challenges. With research spanning psychology, pedagogy, and movement science, nearly all data involve human participants—bringing heightened privacy and ethical considerations.

“Basically, 90–95% of the data that researchers are collecting is coming from human research subjects. A lot of our data ends up being labeled as health data under the GDPR… That wide grouping makes things a bit complicated.”

Within the faculty, data sensitivity varies widely, from low-risk questionnaires to interviews with highly sensitive populations. Support teams must balance enabling openness with ensuring compliance and participant protections.

Supporting Researchers in Practice

While OSF has gained traction across departments, uptake is uneven. Some researchers adopted the platform independently before VU's institutional rollout, creating pockets of established practice in some departments while others remained unfamiliar with the platform. 

While the organic adoption of OSF demonstrated researchers' openness to embracing open practices, it also highlighted the need for institutional oversight.

“There’s a big difference between what researchers think is anonymous and what they think is allowed to be openly published, and what actually should be allowed,” Hrudey said. “There are times when things are getting published openly as open projects on OSF that, if we had a way to step in between, we might have told them, ‘Please don’t do that’”.

To help address this, VU’s data stewards are actively encouraging the use of OSF for preregistration and documentation, aiming to improve transparency, recognition, and the long-term sustainability of research outputs.

As Hrudey  emphasized, “We encourage preregistration not just as a best practice, but to get a clear picture of what our faculty are actually working on,” highlighting how the platform helps research support staff understand and support faculty research efforts throughout the entire research lifecycle.

Beyond preregistration, VU is developing more systematic approaches to help researchers navigate data sharing decisions from the start of their work. This includes tools to help faculty identify privacy risks early and ensure proper consent processes, as well as using OSF to publish documentation and terms of use that can be publicly accessed even when the underlying data requires restricted access.

Looking Ahead

VU’s integrated model continues to evolve as open science practices become more widely encouraged and incentivized. As Hrudey reflected, many funders have required open science practices for several years, including data management plans that ask researchers to consider how they will manage and share their data during and after research.

“We're doing lots of things with rewards and recognition for open science, both in VU and at a national level. Our faculty also has open science awards, and we’re trying to find other ways to recognize good data practices,” she said. “Generally, researchers want to do good, in my experience, and people feel it's worth being open and transparent and sharing whenever possible. But there's definitely support needed to make it happen.”

Bosch also emphasized the importance of institution-wide coordination: “We try to make sure that all of these five lines, from infrastructure to policy, are aligned so that we don’t create policies that we cannot keep, that we cannot enforce, and we don’t have infrastructures that aren’t used.”

Through these coordinated efforts, VU is fostering collaboration, stewardship, and sustainable research practices, helping to ensure that its research community is supported in producing high-quality, transparent, and shareable outputs.