It’s time for a career split: in the coming years, I am adding meta science and research integrity as a second line of research, next to the science of philanthropy. It’s a split, not a switch. I’m far from done with research on research on philanthropy and will keep working on it the Department of Sociology at VU Amsterdam.

Why is the share of income and wealth that people give to charities lower when their income and wealth are higher? Are more generous persons less likely to accumulate wealth? Or does wealth make people care less about those in need? Can fundraising organizations increase generosity by soliciting gifts in different ways? Fifteen years of data from the Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey (Bekkers, De Wit &

Both in the Netherlands and in the USA, generosity has been declining in the past years. In the USA, the value of donations in 2023 declined by 2.1%, adjusted for inflation, according to recent findings from Giving USA. We found a similar decline in generosity in the Netherlands. The value of donations in 2022 reached an all-time low of 0.62% of GDP. The Netherlands gave about € 5.3 billion to charitable causes in the year 2022.

[Update 13 juni 2024: extra nuance toegevoegd; met dank aan Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm] De budgettaire bijlage bij het hoofdlijnenakkoord vermeldt op pagina 4 een bezuiniging op de giftenaftrek. SEO maakte onlangs een evaluatie van de giftenaftrek. Ik las de evaluatie in het licht van de bezuinigingsplannen. Hier een paar gedachten. Wat zegt de evaluatie van de giftenaftrek over het effect van afschaffing ervan? Helemaal niets. Huh?

Last week I attended a conference organized by the university libraries in the Netherlands with the straightforward title: “What do we want from publishers?” The conference served as a consultation with librarians and other academics, before the universities in the Netherlands start negotiations about deals with commercial publishers such as Elsevier.

Surprisingly little – at least to my taste. Science is supposed to be cumulative: we should build knowledge on solid foundations. But how do we know what knowledge is solid? Through independent verification. If someone claims to have found a regularity, it is only through repeated testing of the same claim that we know that the result holds in other populations and contexts. It turns out that scientists rarely conduct such replications.

Scientific research is based on data. How should researchers treat and document the data they analyze? Research Data Management policies recommend that data should be “as open as possible, and as closed as necessary”. What does that mean in practice? Only publish data you are allowed to publish . The “as open as possible” principle certainly does not mean that researchers should make all data they have public.

Gotcha. Or did the clickbait title not get you here? Regardless, I will try not to disappoint you. But before we get to the promised list, here’s why it is important. The nightmare of every business: suddenly a new competitor emerges, wiping out their entire firm’s market share. When ChatGPT was released a little over a year ago, it was clear that it posed a threat to the business model of schools and universities.

Wat kunnen we na de verkiezingen van november 2023 verwachten voor de universiteiten? In de partijprogramma’s voor de komende verkiezingen komen twee punten bij veel partijen terug: studiemigratie, en de financiering van het hoger onderwijs. Bij sommige partijen zien we ook ideeën over de financiering van wetenschappelijk onderzoek. Het eerste punt is het aantal studenten uit het buitenland dat in Nederland studeert.

René Bekkers, March 21, 2025. At the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS) of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, research integrity is governed by eight policies: The overarching policy is the Netherlands Code of Conduct for Research Integrity adopted by the Royal Academy of Arts &

In the social sciences it is increasingly common to preregister hypotheses, research designs and analysis plans before a study is conducted (Ferguson et al., 2023). Because the time-stamp on the preregistration documents when the ideas for the study were deposited, a preregistration is an intellectual honesty device.