How can research systems remain open, sustainable, and community-driven in an increasingly complex publishing landscape? These are some of the questions shaping the work of Rutger de Jong, subject librarian and repository manager at Leiden University.

As Leiden University joins the OpenAIRE network, he reflects on his experience with national initiatives such as the Dutch Repository Federation (DURF), the importance of digital sovereignty, and the need to strengthen open infrastructure.

Can you please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background and expertise?  

My name is Rutger de Jong, I am a subject librarian for the Science department of Leiden University and manager of our Scholarly Publications repository. After my M.Sc. in chemistry I started out my career as a science journalist. When the economic crisis around 2012 hit the publishing industry and journalistic freedom slowly disappeared as a consequence, I decided to use my information skills within Leiden University as subject librarian. Initially with a sidetrack around data management. Later I took over the management of our publications repository as I saw there was a big need to make better use of green Open Access options, while at the same time seeing a need to make our output more visible.

Was there a specific moment or challenge that made you realise Open Science was the only way forward for your institution?

As a journalist I always missed out on having direct access, but knew how important access to scholarly works and data is. Not just for small companies and startups, even big universities such as Leiden can’t subscribe to all content. However, I am a pragmatic, and know nothing is for free. This is also why I tend to focus most on the green Open Access model for dissemination.

What is the one thing about the research landscape in The Netherlands that you are most excited to change through this membership?

For me membership with OpenAIRE is strongly connected to a project I am involved in within The Netherlands: the Dutch Repository Federation (DURF). This project involves strengthening the national Open Infrastructure by working together as the Dutch community to regain our digital sovereignty. Our Netherlands Research Portal plays an important role in this regard, it acts as a village square where we ensure that all noses are turned in the same direction.

We will keep each other to the same standards of providing rich metadata through our local repositories and Current Research Information Systems and will help each other by enriching what is not quite there yet. We intend to do this by using OpenAIRE’s broker service and by ingesting fulltext for our publications.

Once we have improved our information locally, and set an example for other countries, we also have a better starting point for research and for building open infrastructure that does not yet exist. For example, databases on chemical reactions and chemical compounds are very important for both chemical and pharmacological research. Current databases are extremely expensive and come with many clauses surrounding the use of the data, basically preventing AI for in silico (computational) medicine development.

Could you share some of the current projects or initiatives you're involved in related to Open Science?  

There are quite a few, both internal and external. The previously mentioned DURF project is a major one at the moment as I am theme lead for 2 of its 5 sub themes. It received a €1.5 million grant from the Dutch Research Council and will run until 2030. Whereas DURF focuses on strengthening the decentralised infrastructure, we also have a related project called BROCCOLI that focuses on a centralised data lake which will be used for research evaluation, Open Science monitoring and usage of our read and publish deals. As a consultant I am involved in another large project on Diamond Open Access from the same funding call for strengthening the national open infrastructure. Internally we are working on things such as migrating our repository infrastructure to another platform and setting up publication policies for our research institutes to keep Open Science financially sustainable.

Is there a particular aspect of Open Science that resonates with you personally? Could you tell us about it?  

What resonates most with me, is that Open Science may open up new research. Having an index such as the OpenAIRE Graph is just step one in the process. Once we gather all information, we can start looking for patterns, use our contents efficiently, etc. It may sound a little like I want a generic large language model to take over, but in fact, I think it gives us new ways to make non-generic models that do help in scientific research and policy making. That last example is actually one I heard of at the Open Repositories Conference in South Africa in 2024. It would be great if we can check political ideas against current scientific knowledge and existing laws, so we can make more informed decisions and have a good idea of the consequences of these policy ideas.

How do you see Open Science evolving in the next decade, and what role do you hope to play in that evolution?  

Unfortunately, I am someone who is both optimistic and critical. In the next years, I think the most important issue will be that our current system of publishing in Open Access is becoming too expensive, unless we focus more on green Open Access or let societies step up to change their models back to the ones before big publishers started to buy the rights to their journals. Publish, curate and review might be a model that works with these societies, however I don’t see a market for this model if it is not strongly rooted in the community.

Artificial Intelligence is another one of the big threats to Open Science, which might seem strange after the hopeful remarks I gave before. There are two issues at play here: people producing AI slop (overflowing the publishing system) and AI not being quite smart enough in gathering new information.

As COAR has also established in a short survey, most repositories suffer outages due to AI bots inserting many queries to gather recent articles without any ethical concerns for our systems. To make it worse, they are using methods that make them indistinguishable from real persons. The consequence is, that both repositories and publishers are not sharing their content that freely anymore, setting up barriers such as bot checks (which bots excel at over humans). It has always been my goal to provide information with as little barriers as possible, thus I would like to contribute to a solution. This could be for example by providing a data lake from OpenAIRE specifically for bots or by agreeing on standards with AI companies.

What advice would you give to someone who is just starting to explore the world of Open Science?  

Most problems can be solved easily by technology, such as ingesting articles written by your researchers into your CRIS. However, be aware that most problems also have both a technical limitation (systems are old and expensive to replace) and a political limitation (a higher coverage but also missing out on specific fields). So my advice would be: learn how to get people on board for your projects to solve the political issues and collaborate with colleagues within your country to move things forward.

Outside of your work in Open Science, what are some of your personal interests or hobbies?  

Even though my focus is usually a lot on digital materials, programming and artificial intelligence, I strive to be more of a ‘homo universalis’ (polymath). My pastimes are mostly focused on storytelling and creating art, or the combination of both in the form of graphic novels.

Can you share a lesson learned from your career that completely changed how you view scholarly communication?

We have this book in Dutch called ‘Heer Bommel en de Bovenbazen’ in which the money in the vault of Bommel reaches a critical point above which it becomes a sort of money magnet and sucks money in from its surroundings. We have to ensure that we never focus too much on a single project or publisher that it will take the life out of other initiatives.

The current big publishers are a good example how such a money magnet works in scholarly publishing as there are several methods that exclude mainly small publishers and companies from competing. All steps seemed as a good idea at the time but are harming the community in the long run:

• Read and publish deals provide a budgetable cost and discount. However, deals are only made if the number of publications is high enough to make such a deal. Once there is a deal, researchers will flock to the chosen R&P deals;
• The old publishing cascade is no more: publishers reroute articles that are out of scope for the author’s first choice to other journals within the publishing house. There is no need to bring in other reviewers or search for other journals yourself. Of course, smaller publishers can’t offer this advantage and people will shy away from sending their manuscripts to them.
• The idea of large Open Access journals that do not focus on a specific topic sounds good, as the ‘not-on-topic’ rejection is no issue anymore. However, connecting such a journal to the previous practice is a great way to trap the article and get a required APC at the same time.
• Having paid for Open Access at the publisher, does not mean someone is allowed to download it at a large scale as infrastructure can be used to create barriers. As a publisher you can resell the contents for text and data mining purposes in a container for Retrieval-Augmented Generation if you have sufficient content.

The only way forward is by ensuring equal opportunities. Having digital sovereignty, is one step in that direction as we are the ones in charge and can and will support a whole ecosystem with our contribution.