Move is “severe blow” to open science movement, says leader
The Dutch government plans to halve the annual budget of the country’s national initiative for promoting open science, a move that stakeholders have warned could significantly hinder the country’s progress in the area.
Open science is a movement to make the methods and outputs of research more readily available for scrutiny and reuse, to make it more reliable and fruitful. Open Science NL, which is part of the Dutch Research Council (NWO), is the national programme to promote this movement.
The annual budget of Open Science NL will be cut from €20 million to €10 million, starting in 2025, in a move that was revealed in the national budget presented to the Lower House on Budget Day. It comes as part of a broader planned cut of €1 billion in public funding for research and higher education, which has caused consternation in the sector.
‘Severe blow’
Lex Bouter, chair of the steering board of Open Science NL, said: “This reduction is a severe blow to open science. Successive Dutch governments have rightly invested in making science more accessible, transparent and collaborative. Coupled with other funding reductions, this drastic cut threatens to erode the country’s hard-won advancements and leadership in the field.”
The announcement follows an earlier decision by the governing parties to reduce the Research and Science Fund, which includes the budget for Open Science NL, by €150m annually. Open Science NL said it would receive a “disproportionate” share of the cut.
“This is extremely disappointing,” said Hans de Jonge, director of Open Science NL. He noted that the initiative was recently recognised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization as “one of the most progressive in the world”.
“Our funding is crucial for realising all those plans [for open science that] institutions and researchers have in the Netherlands,” De Jonge said. “If this goes ahead, we will have to make tough choices.”
Doubts over planned projects
Launched in 2023, Open Science NL is a temporary initiative aimed at making open science, including open access to research results and increased societal engagement, the norm in the Netherlands by 2030. It has supported several initiatives, including training data stewards, enhancing citizen-science projects and launching a €12.5m call for open science infrastructure proposals.
Planned activities for the coming years included initiatives focused on replication research and funding for open research software. These efforts are now under threat due to the impending budget cuts.
Open Science NL said that initiatives it has already supported are “safe” but that it will need to assess whether projects expected to have been undertaken in 2025 can go ahead. “We will list the various possibilities and, ultimately, our steering board will decide how to allocate our resources,” it said.
The final decision on the budget will depend on the outcomes of discussions in Parliament, which are expected to take place at the end of October or in early November.
Open Science NL urged politicians to reconsider the cut. “We cannot address today’s and tomorrow’s major societal challenges with closed science. Yet that is precisely what this proposal suggests,” it said.
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