A recently published series of open science guides help researchers in the Netherlands navigate open science. They cover topics such as pre-prints, open licenses, questionable publication practices (forthcoming) and how to apply open science in practice.

All guides are open access and are available via the open repository Zenodo. For ease of reference, we have gathered the guides below. The list will be updated as more guides are published in the future. 

Open Science: A Practical Guide for Early-Career Researchers (2023)

This guide is useful for anyone looking for practical information about open science, but is specifically designed for PhD candidates, Research Master Students and early-career researchers. It is meant to accompany them in every step of their research, from the phase of preparing their research project and discovering relevant resources (chapter 2), to the phase of data collection and analysis (chapter 3), writing and publishing articles, data, and other research output (chapter 4), and outreach and assessment (chapter 5). Every chapter provides help, tools, links and practices that can be applied immediately. 

Open Science: A Practical Guide for Early-Career Researchers

A Practical Guide to Preprints: Accelerating Scholarly Communication (2021)

This guide aims to support researchers and members of the general public (journalists, patients, healthcare workers, etc.) from, but not limited to, the Netherlands answering frequently asked questions about preprints, such as how they differ from published articles in academic journals, how to practically post a preprint and how to approach the research findings published in preprints. 

A Practical Guide to Preprints: Accelerating Scholarly Communication

Guide to Creative Commons for Scholarly Publications and Educational Resources (2020)

This guide is designed to inform researchers in the Netherlands about the Creative Commons (CC) license system. The guide addresses frequently asked questions such as what license to choose when publishing a paper, a book or teaching material, how CC licenses work and what different types there are. 

Guide to Creative Commons for Scholarly Publications and Educational Resources

Guide on Predatory and Questionable publishing practices 

Predatory publishers can harm scholars and their institutions financially and reputationally by charging a fee for no peer review or publishing service at all. Predatory publishers and questionable publishing practices have a negative effect on the credibility of the published scholarly record and the scholarly community as a whole. This guide, written by open access specialists at universities across the Netherlands, provides insight and practical advice for authors on how to avoid questionable and predatory journals.

Guide on Predatory and Questionable publishing practices

Other practical information 

• FAQ for the Rights Retention Strategy at Dutch Universities
• Report on Retaining Rights and Open Licensing in Europe
• FAQ to find out about the open access policies of the most relevant research funding organizations in the Netherlands