Centre for Science and Technology Studies

Open Science Lab

The Open Science Lab bundles expertise on Open Science at CWTS and contributes to and studies the transition towards Open Science at CWTS, Leiden University, and beyond. It serves as a knowledge broker, facilitator, and platform for learning and exchange.

The CWTS Open Science Lab is inspired by the UNESCO 2017 Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers and the 2021 Recommendation on Open Science, building on the notions that science is a common good, that all humankind should enjoy the benefits of scientific knowledge and has the right to participate in it. In general, Open Science is mostly about the primary process of knowledge creation, involving aspects such as transparency and accessibility in research practices. As such, the OS Lab is in particularly focused on the underlying values that drive science and its interactions with society.

Goals and ambitions

There are three main goals for the Open Science Lab, namely:

Focus on a wider cultural change within Leiden University, and not so much on the actual and practical realisation of Open Science practices.
While monitoring, focus on where specific gaps occur, with regards to the value-based adaptation of Open Science.
Facilitate dialogue across the faculties of Leiden University concerning more common problems related to Open Science.

As an ambition, the CWTS Open Science Lab:

Forms the basis to support the Leiden University Academy in Motion programme, via the Open Science Research programme at CWTS.
Offers a platform to combine the understanding, intervening and practicing dimensions of the CWTS Knowledge Agenda with respect to the OS transition and development.
Will be a platform to help develop the “Monitoring of Open Science policies & practices” mission.
A platform for critical reflections on the developments within the transition towards open science, to also signal the things that will go wrong during the transition.
Share and apply the knowledge and expertise of CWTS relating to Open Science at Leiden University and beyond.

What do we do?

We are, amongst other things, interested in critical understanding of what Open Science means in context, and how it is shaped to suit the needs and priorities of different research/actor communities. We are interested in how these different interpretations of open research practices can be recognised at institutional, national, and international levels of monitoring and evaluation. We do this by being evidence and experience based.

At the CWTS Open Science Lab we:

Develop new ideas.
Co-create these ideas into actionable plans and real-world solutions to existing problems and locked-in situations.
Share these outcomes within and outside Leiden University, involving academics and non-academics.
Distribute and communicate via open media as broad as possible.

The CWTS Open Science Lab offers such space:

For internal (both CWTS and colleagues in other faculties and institutes at Leiden University) and external users (Open Science communities across the Netherlands, SURF, Open Science NL, the Research Intelligence Network Netherlands (RINN), etc.).
In a safe and democratic environment.
On all aspects of Open Science.
For policy development.