Although fraud and misconduct have always existed in research and scholarly communication, the rise of paper mills over the past decade has led to an unprecedented volume of fake or manipulated research being published. A 2022 report jointly published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the STM Association suggests that between 2 and 46% of submissions to journals in the time between 2019 and 2021 were produced by paper mills.

The new administration in the US is attacking science. Accepted grants and publications are forced to be retracted or altered if they contain forbidden words. Funding and peer review processes for biomedical research are grinding to a halt, and (open) governmental data are being taken down to reflect the views of the current political administration.

Various reform movements are working hard to improve the research system, focusing on issues ranging from research assessment, diversity and inclusion, and research culture to scientific publishing, open science, reproducibility, research integrity, and several others. The agendas of the different reform movements are interconnected and partly overlapping, but sometimes they are also in tension.

Over the past two years, the Information & Openness focal area has made progress in promoting openness in research information through many internal discussions and wider projects. Our efforts have focused on supporting openness-driven data usage and decision making in science management and evaluation, and recognizing the important role open research information plays in these processes.

For centuries, the scientific community has relied on visual tools to communicate (complex) data. But what if we could listen to data as effortlessly as we read a graph? This question lies at the heart of data sonification, a practice that translates datasets into sound.

The transition towards open research practices has been a longstanding priority for Dutch academics. Over the last decade, the bottom-up support for open research practices has been accompanied by consolidated, national-level support. This country-level initiative has resulted in the 2017 National Plan for Open Science (NPOS) and the 2022 Open Science in 2030 in the Netherlands.

Open science initiatives have increased the amount of (openly) available research data. Such data are often shared with the idea that they will be reused, although reuse is far from being guaranteed. Working to bridge the distance between data producers and data consumers has been suggested as one possible way to facilitate the reuse of existing data supplies.

( Klik hier om de Nederlandse versie te lezen ) In any evaluation of scientific research, the obvious question is: how does a research unit compare with others, nationally and internationally? This question is easier to ask than to answer, because the answer is not easy to substantiate.

( To read the English version, click here ) Bij iedere evaluatie van wetenschappelijk onderzoek ligt de vraag voor de hand: hoe presteert een onderzoekseenheid in vergelijking met anderen, nationaal en internationaal? Die vraag is makkelijker gesteld dan beantwoord, want een antwoord laat zich niet gemakkelijk onderbouwen.

Introduction Independent 10 researchers are a diverse category of researchers, from those who want to pursue their own path to the ones who are struggling to stay within the competitive world of academia. We define independent researchers broadly as people who conduct research without an institutional affiliation.

On a lively afternoon at the National Open Science Festival in Maastricht, we hosted an interactive session titled "The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information – Developments in the Netherlands." Our aim was to jointly explore the challenges surrounding open research information, and brainstorm actionable solutions with a diverse audience of signatories and non-signatories alike.