On 9 February, the ORI community gathered at Saxion University of Applied Sciences in Deventer for an inspiring and energising meet-up. We are incredibly grateful to our hosts at Saxion for their warm welcome. Finding the main entrance, the theater and the rooms for the breakouts was a challenge, but our ORI community has problem solving as a key skill, no one got super lost.
And of course, no visit to Deventer would be complete without the famous Deventer Bijtje, a spiced reminder that building a commons also happens in the informal moments between sessions.
In late 2025, the Netherlands Barcelona Declaration Network met in Leiden to reflect and set priorities for 2026. This blog outlines those priorities and highlights how the growing network of universities, funders, and research infrastructures advances open, community-governed research information.
In the PID2Portal project we want to monitor the completeness, accuracy and openness of research information in the Netherlands. This has been discussed last Monday with the Dutch signatories of the Barcelona declaration. To make that happen, we’re experimenting with a next-generation Open Research Information (ORI) data infrastructure to support that use case for ORI Monitoring. Using an open, reproducible stack (DuckDB/DuckLake, Marimo, OpenMetadata, and AI-assisted enrichment), all based on SURF infrastructure components (Research Cloud, S3 Block Storage, AI-Hub), we’re testing what works in practice. This experimental stack provides relevant input for the BROCCOLI project, and is combining the knowledge and insights of research intelligence units from multiple institutions who were experimenting with Azure, DataBricks and BigQuery.
By the SURF ORI Program Team
14 Oktober 2025 marked the official kick-off of the PID to Portal project, funded by UNL and a key initiative within the SURF Open Research Information (ORI) program 2025–2030. The project team, steering board, and community representatives came together to align on the shared goal: strengthening the open research information chain — from persistent identifiers (PIDs) to the public research portal — to make Dutch research information more visible, trusted, and connected.
[download project plan]
When people say "make data FAIR" I wonder whether they mean doing extra paperwork after the fact, or changing how data are created so they’re FAIR from the start — #bornFAIR. Ideally, adding metadata should feel like a tiny, natural part of researchers’ normal workflows and should give them immediate benefits. We should be thinking about FAIR across the whole organization, not just at the end, making it much easier to work with and implement. I have a number of potential ideas that can make the FAIR process better for researchers and research-support and I would like to share them here and invite anyone to comment or reach out to see if we can collaborate.
SURF has officially released the Open Research Information (ORI) Program 2025-2030, marking a significant milestone in the Netherlands' journey toward open research information. This program aims to fulfill the goal set by the SURF Members' Council:
"All information about Dutch publicly funded research and its results are openly available and reusable."
The program represents a coordinated effort across the Dutch research ecosystem to transition from dependence on closed commercial platforms to a federated, open infrastructure that upholds core academic values.
A new generation of artificial intelligence systems—so-called “AI co-scientists”—is emerging. These systems do not merely summarize existing research; they generate novel hypotheses, simulate experiments, and propose new directions for science. In biomedical use cases, such systems have already matched or surpassed human experts in idea generation and even mirrored years of experimental insight within days.
But such performance hinges on one critical factor: access to structured, machine-readable research information. Not just publications and data, but metadata about everything that constitutes our scientific system—researchers, projects, grants, organizations, software, equipment, samples, patents, educational output, and societal impact.
In short: to realize the potential of AI in science, we must treat open and FAIR metadata about all research entities as a national strategic asset.
While it’s common knowledge that warming up to BROCCOLI takes time, this past Easter marked a significant milestone for a group of open research information experts and enthusiasts who have grown fond of the vegetable. Representatives from SURF, Leiden University, TU Delft, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Wageningen University & Research have submitted the full proposal for the Open Science NL Infrastructure call.
Resilience and sovereignty are the keywords for the Dutch Repository Federation’s proposal for the OSNL Open Infrastructure call. Last week we sent in our proposal, the pre-proposal of which was endorsed by all university rectors. DURF hopes to get funded so the work can start, as the need for our work becomes clearer by the day.
[download our proposal]
Monday December 16th we organised a webinar to inform the community about two of the submitted Open Science NL pre-proposals: DURF and BROCCOLI. We share the recording and slides in this post.
