RINN & ORI Summer Event 2026 – Are we ready to open yet?

About the event

The event will focus on the growing role of open research information, and the practical steps institutions are taking toward more open, transparent, and sustainable research intelligence workflows.

Attendance: in person or online

This event will be live-streamed, but online interaction will be limited to submitting questions via the Q&A chat. For the best experience and full engagement, we strongly encourage attending in person where possible. If you’re unable to join us on-site, we would still be pleased to welcome you online so you don’t miss out.

Organisers

This event is jointly organised by Research Intelligence at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus MC, and the SURF Open Research Information Community.

Programme

• 09:30 – 10:00 Arrival and coffee
• 10:00 – 10:05 Welcome
  Michiel Besters, Director of Engagement & Research Services, Erasmus University Rotterdam 
• 10:05 – 10:15 RINN position statement on Open Research Information 
• 10:15 – 11:00 Panel discussion on Infrastructure as a Shared Responsibility: Sovereignty, Collaboration and the Future of Dutch Research Infrastructure 
  Short introduction by Eileen Waegemaekers (SURF)
  
  Panelists:  Dr. Ava Irani - Senior Policy Coordination, Open Science, UvA; Lucia Collara - Product Lead Digital Infrastructure, University Library, UvA; Cristina Huidiu - Product Owner, Digital Library Services, Wageningen University; Gennady Roshchupkin - Assistant Professor Computational Population Biology and UMCNL Program Manager for AI Strategy for Research, Development & Innovation (Erasmus MC) 
  Moderator: The van Leeuwen (CWTS)
  
  Description: Every infrastructure choice is also a values choice. The metadata standards we adopt, the repositories we federate, the data pipelines we build - these are not neutral technical decisions. They encode assumptions about who produces knowledge, how that knowledge is preserved, and who governs the systems that make it findable and usable over time.
  
  This talk explores what it means for a university - to treat digital research infrastructure as a strategic and ethical responsibility. It does so through the lens of UvA's active engagement with two landmark Dutch national initiatives: DURF (Dutch Repository Federation) and BROCCOLI (a federated hub for open Dutch research information), both of which received unanimous endorsement from university rectors across the Netherlands.  
• 11:00 – 11:15 Coffee break 

• 11:15 – 12:00 Keynote lecture 1: Research and Innovation Indicator Framework – An example from the Danish CoARA chapter 
  Poul Meier Melchiorsen, Aalborg University

   

  Description: What does it actually mean to be responsible when you are in charge of research evaluation—and how do you balance that ideal with everyday pragmatics? This talk explores how traditional bibliometrics can coexist with emerging open science and CoARA-inspired approaches at both university and national levels. Drawing on hands-on experience from developing and implementing a research and innovation indicator framework, it offers insights into what happens when principles meet practice. Along the way, I share reflections from the “travel log” of the Danish CoARA chapter: the challenges, trade-offs, and small breakthroughs that shape the journey toward more responsible evaluation. The shift is not just technical, but cultural, from one-dimensional metrics to multi-dimensional understanding, and from managing by numbers to asking: What are our priorities, and how should progress be measured?

• 12:00 – 12:30 Presentation on Bibliometrics Without Barriers: An Open Platform for Literature Analysis  

  Juan Pablo Bascur, PhD, Leiden University
  
  Description: Bibliometric analysis and science mapping are useful for policymakers, researchers, and anyone trying to understand a field. But existing tools require expensive licenses or programming skills, which keeps most people from using them. This is a great waste, as it makes academic literature less useful and mostly out of reach for the general public. This presentation describes a set of free, open tools built to lower that barrier. They run in a web browser, require no installation or coding, and all methods are documented. The main tool, ORION, lets users run queries on OpenAlex data in Google BigQuery without writing code, and includes a dedicated interface for exploring research institutions and funders. The other two tools support bibliometric mapping. Text Similarity Maker takes plain text as input and generates a science map, handling all the steps in between. SciMacro visualizes citation networks as clusters and allows iterative filtering and reclustering, so users can steer the map and bring specific topics into focus. The presentation will also focus on the lessons learned building these tools, including user experience design, open science infrastructure, and AI-assisted programming. This talk should be useful both for people who want to use the tools and for those thinking about building something similar.

• 12:30 – 13:30 Lunch 

• 13:30 – 14:15 Keynote lecture 2: Toward Open Research Infrastructure:  Lessons, Gaps, and What Comes Next 

  Kaitlin Thaney, Invest in Open Infrastructure 

  
  Open research infrastructure is no longer a niche concern – it's a strategic priority for libraries, funders, and institutions worldwide. But building and sustaining that infrastructure is harder than it looks. Who pays? Who governs? And how do we ensure that openness doesn't just benefit well-resourced institutions?
  
  This talk offers a grounded look at the current landscape of open infrastructure – including nonprofit knowledge sources, persistent identifiers, and emerging data hubs – with an eye toward what's working, what's fragile, and what the Netherlands' own investments can learn from global experience.

• 14:15 – 14:45 Presentation: Monitoring strategic technologies using open research information 
  Matthijs de Zwaan, Ruben Lacroix, Silvia Fattori (VU Amsterdam University Library) 

  
  European and national policy frameworks addressing strategic autonomy and knowledge security, such as the EU Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP) and the Dutch National Technology Strategy (NTS), identify technologies that are expected to drive economic competitiveness and societal transitions. Monitoring progress in these areas informs funding and governance decisions, but the information used for this purpose often relies on proprietary data that limits transparency and independent verification. 

  
  Our work presents a framework for profiling academic research in these strategic technologies using open research information. Developed in collaboration with Universiteiten van Nederland, the project examines the contribution of Dutch universities to the objectives of the NTS and demonstrates how research libraries can support policy monitoring using openly available metadata. 

  
  The framework is built on OpenAlex as the primary data source. A large language model is used to classify research outputs into technology clusters defined in the NTS, enabling alignment between policy categories and scholarly research fields. We combine standard bibliometric indicators on research output and citation impact with a measure of relative specialisation, allowing institutional and national strengths to be assessed.
  
  The results show that it is feasible to construct a transparent and reproducible evidence base for monitoring strategic technologies using open data and methods. The framework illustrates how libraries can use their expertise in working with research data to offer analytical support. As such, it provides a practical example of how open research information can be used to inform research assessment and policy discussions.

• 14:45 – 15:15 Presentation: How are procurement decisions within Dutch Research Performing Organisations being shaped by the Barcelona Declaration? The curious case of machine actionable Data Management Plans' 

  Andrew Hoffman (CWTS/FSW Leiden University), Eileen Waegemaekers (SURF) 

  
  The Barcelona Declaration, published in April 2024, now counts seventeen Dutch Research Performing Organisations (RPOs), funders, and supporting organizations among its signatories. Those who have signed on commit themselves to upholding four key principles: making openness of ORI the default, working with systems that support and enable ORI, supporting the sustainability of ORI infrastructure, and supporting collective action to accelerate the transition to ORI. At the same time, Dutch RPOs have also made significant investments over the past five years in supporting responsible research data management (RDM), which includes an emphasis on making research data ‘FAIR’ if not also openly available, and which often requires researchers to draw up Data Management Plans (DMPs) for their projects. In the latter case, we currently witness a high level of heterogeneity in terms of the tools and workflows Dutch RPOs provide to their researchers to support data management planning.
  
  Drawing from our experiences coordinating the Dutch national machine-actionable DMP pilot – part of the larger Horizon-funded OSTrails project, running from 2024-2027 – this presentation poses, provides a few tentative answers to, and aims to spur further discussion about two main questions. First: Where are the critical points of overlap between innovations in maDMP tooling on the one hand, and ORI-enabling resources on the other? And from here, what are the levers for Dutch RPO’s meaningful engagement with the BD’s commitments in such a way that they can inform procurement decisions, especially regarding the procurement of platforms that both foster responsible RDM planning and that also uphold the commitment to ‘working with services and systems that support and enable open research information.’ 

• 15:15 – 15:30 Coffee break 

• 15:30 – 16:00 Presentation: Built by AI, Powered by AI: Lessons from building two applications on Open Research Information 
  Nick Veenstra (Groningen University and University Medical Center Groningen) 

  
  How far can you get building real applications on open research information, and where do you still hit the limits of openness? This presentation shares hands-on experience from two AI-built and -driven systems developed at RUG and UMCG. 

  
  VALERIE is an automated publication metadata pipeline for Pure, ingesting from Scopus and OpenAlex while performing organization matching and cleanup against ROR. AIGO is a personalized funding recommender for medical researchers, combining embedding-based retrieval, locally-hosted LLMs, and medical classifications. 

  
  Both were largely AI-built, which surfaces a new challenge: maintaining code authored by multiple people and multiple AI agents, where consistency, review, and governance become harder than the original development. I’ll share what worked and what didn’t, including compliance hurdles around agentic AI in a medical institution.
  
  I’ll close with an outlook: we are in a phase where AI helps us build many tools, but increasingly only the data will matter, with AI presenting any desired insight on demand. For open research information, that makes the openness and quality of the underlying data the decisive factor, more than the applications built on top. 

• 16:00 - 16:30 Interactive session: Sustainability of Open Infrastructures,
  Bianca Kramer (Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information)
• 16:30 – 16:50 Wrap-up of the day and take-home messages - Tung Tung Chan
• 16:50 – 17:00 Closing remarks - Rik Iping
• 17:00 Drinks

Contact 

For questions, program updates, or practical information, please contact: rinn@rug.nl

Keynote Speakers

Poul Meier Melchiorsen

Senior Consultant, Aalborg University Library 

Poul Meier Melchiorsen works with research intelligence and research information analysis at Aalborg University, specialising in translating research data into meaningful decision support, institutional insight, and increased research visibility. His expertise spans bibliometrics, indicator development, metadata quality, and strategic reporting, as well as supporting researcher profiles, ORCID implementation, and research registration in Pure. He is also deeply involved in advancing methods for documenting innovation and societal impact, including approaches that go beyond traditional citation-based metrics. Since 2018, Poul has served as Lead of the Danish ORCID Consortium, and since 2025 as Co-chair of the Danish CoARA Chapter, contributing to more responsible and nuanced research assessment practices.

Kaitlin Thaney

Executive Director, Invest in Open Infrastructure 

Kaitlin Thaney helps mission-driven organisations think strategically about programme design, participatory engagement, and long-term sustainability. A long-time advocate for openness, she has spent much of her career advising and building initiatives that expand open access to research, data, content, and code through roles at Mozilla, Wikimedia, Digital Science, and Creative Commons. She currently serves as Executive Director of Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), a global coalition working to enable durable and scalable open scholarly and scientific infrastructure.

Registration