At OpenAIRE's recent General Assembly in Urla, Türkiye, we were thrilled to welcome Joeri Both as one of the newly elected members of our Executive Board. Joeri, Head of Research Support at the University Library of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, brings a wealth of expertise in advancing research support and Open Science initiatives. Meet him through the following interview. Enjoy! 

1. Please introduce yourself and talk to us a bit about your position and organisation 

My name is Joeri Both and I am vice director of the University Library of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. I have been working in academic libraries for over ten years and before that I worked as a molecular biologist, obtaining a PhD from the University of Amsterdam. I love working in academic libraries because among librarians there is a sense of extreme cooperation and having a goal of making the world a better place. 

I have been working at the VU now for over 7 years. The VU is called a “Vrije” (“free” in Dutch) university because when it was founded in 1880 it was free from oversight by the church or state. It is a middle-sized university in the Netherlands, with the most diverse student population in the country and has also won the Green Gown award for its work on sustainability, being the first university to cut ties with the fossil fuel industry. The university library has invested a lot over the last years to become a state-of-the-art service provider on research data management and open science and I am proud to head these efforts as part of my role at the library. 

2. What does Open Science mean to you and what do you think it means for the future of research and science in general? 

I like the slogan- Open Science is just science done right. To me it means liberating the science practices in academia; being as transparent as possible without giving away the edge that one might have on a certain topic. It is also a way to battle the “unwanted” side effects of science. In my own time as a scientist, I have seen researchers wanting to be on a paper without doing any actual work for instance, and I know this still happens today, but with making the research process more transparent we can tackle these issues better. For the future, I envision a system that recognizes and rewards the individual steps of the scientific process much more than we do now. In my own team of Research Intelligence, we often try to have a conversation on what impact really is, and researchers are interested in that conversation but in the end, they still want to have a bibliometric analysis including the mean impact factor of their work! And I think this will remain so unless we make it more rewarding to practice open science. 

3. What do you think is the next big step in the development of Open Science? 

As an academic community, we have been making great strides in making Open Science possible. Developments like the European Open Science Cloud, and the Barcelona Declaration keep the momentum going. In the Netherlands, we have exceeded 95% Open Access and are publishing more and more data and software in open repositories. However, this has been accomplished at huge costs. Especially for Open Access this model is unattainable. Gold OA is not a sustainable way forward, and we need to transition to a more community-based Diamond OA publishing system. Just this week we saw Clarivate ending their indexing of eLife articles. To me this is unfathomable, eLife has been trying to open up the untransparent publishing dogma and they get the opposite in return from a company like Clarivate. Further, as I said before academia needs to start diversifying and rewarding the different types of output that researchers put out there. 

4. As an OpenAIRE NOAD, you have a unique insight into how open science is introduced/ received in your country; could you describe your local Open Science ecosystem?  

First, I am not taking over as NOAD, Loek Brinkman from DANS will remain the NOAD for the Netherlands. However, at the VU we think Open Science is a main topic to work on. I already told you about the situation at the VU. Nationally we are in a crisis at this time. If you had asked me this question last year, I would have had a glorious story to tell about the great investments the Dutch government was going to make into Open Science. However, with the current extreme right government in the Netherlands, the Higher Education system in the Netherlands is under great threat and we need to get extremely creative to keep the momentum going nationally. For the moment we are in a good position on Open Access, and we are working on great infrastructure for FAIR data and software. But I worry about the hard times ahead and hope that we can at least maintain the current status. 

5. As an Open Science “ambassador”, what are the two most common questions you receive when people want to know about OS? What is your strategy when answering them? 

One I have already mentioned in other questions and that is - “why should I do it (Open Science) to begin with?” Right now, you see a lot of idealists working on Open Science because they know it is the right way forward. But not everyone is convinced yet. So, we talk about the democratization of science and about the right of society to have a say in this. The second question is I think, - “Where do I begin?”. Especially young scientists who are more inclined to open up their science, find it daunting to begin working on this. And my answer is always: small steps, start at the beginning and think of your research process and realize that every stap you take is a worthwhile step, whether it is preregistering your project or opening a data set. It is all worthwhile. 

6. Also, what are the two most common misconceptions that you come across regarding OS? 

The first one is that Open Science is free. It takes an enormous effort and investments to turn around a system that has existed for so long and has been successful. 

The second one would be that you are not allowed to keep data for yourself if there is still something to gain from it for you or when there are legal restrictions. We always so to researchers as open as possible as closed as necessary. There are always ways to publish for instance the metadata of a dataset, without sharing the entire data if you are writing a paper on it. 

1. What are your aspirations, hopes and vision for the future of Open Science, both in Europe as well as the rest of the world? 

When it comes to Europe I see a bright future ahead, with the launch of the European Open Science Cloud and the effect that will have in the European countries I am really excited about that. I think Europe is a beacon of change for the rest of the world. We invest a lot here in Europe in Open Science but we don’t see that reflected in the world. I see that as a threat as well. Other parts of the world are not joining in the change of the scientific system while again other parts cannot wait to join. My hope is that we can come to a truly open system for science in which the betterment of humanity and the planet is the goal and not personal.

Thank you so much and welcome on board!