Anka Mulder, Vice President of Education and Operations at TU Delft, invited me to speak briefly about Open Science at our Open Education Seminar during Open Education Week 2016. I had only limited time so I could not really expand on the topic, but I think that it is really good to combine the two. We want to share our work or results to society, so that both economy and society-at-large can benefit. Open up your software, your research data & publications, your education and your campus. To move forward. To make science better. Of course open if possible, closed if necessary.
As I stated it all started over (far) more than a decade ago with lobbying for open access. Open access, a topic that goes hand in hand with libraries. TU Delft Library’s mission is to let knowledge flow freely, because students, teachers and researchers will become better when they use knowledge of others, and share their own (see also an older post “share to grow“). In The Netherlands things have gone rather “wild” lately in relation with open access to publications, and I think that has a reason.
The Netherlands are now seen as a forerunner, as guide towards open access. To my opinion this was due to two factors: enhancement & diversity. After the statement by our State Secretary, we joined efforts (VSNU, UKB and Surfmarket) in the negotiation teams, and we had them chaired by our Vice Chancellors. Three of them were directly involved and formed a front of our universities towards the publishers. A true enhancement with respect to the situation before where we had our negotiations without Board level involvement. When we discussed our conditions with the publishers, we made it explicit that we wanted to move to open access via the license deals, without us paying more money. We stuck to our principles, but we added diversity by accepting a variety of paces along the way.
Learning from experience is always wise. We will start at TU Delft as per 1 May 2016 to have all Delft authors to post their paper (final accepted version) in our institutional repository. We diversify, i.e., we follow the gold route as far as we manage to be successful in our license negotiations, we follow the green route where journals do not offer other open access solutions (or far too expensive ones) and we stimulate new initiatives. We enhance our Open Science umbrella by implementing Open Research as stepping stone to Open Science. We are setting up a data stewardship programme with our faculties supported by a multidisciplinary team (Library, ICT, Legal Services, Strategic Development) as part of our 2016 agenda. Understanding that for research data diversification means that we open them if possible, and close them if necessary and using a fair (findable accessible interoperable reusable) approach.
TU Delft is also a forerunner in Open Education. We started with OpenCourseware by providing free and open educational resources in 2007. Many other initiatives have arisen in the mean time, from free MOOCs, online masters to paid Professional Education. So also here, some content is open, some is closed. The bottomline is that we want to share. Or as Anka Mulder puts as tagline on her weblog: “Deliver World Class Education to Everyone”.