eScience Center – Lorentz Competition 2026

The Netherlands eScience Center and the Lorentz Center invite researchers to join the annual eScience Center – Lorentz Competition. The winner will organise a workshop at the Lorentz Center in Leiden and receive research software engineering support from the Netherlands eScience Center. This year the focus is on:

Digital sovereignty in research

Modern research increasingly depends on infrastructure we don’t control: cloud providers, publishing platforms, foundation models, subscriptions on terms that can change without notice. Open or public alternatives don’t match the speed, scale, user-friendliness and continuity of the largest commercial providers, leaving many researchers caught between dependence and compromise. The result: a research ecosystem that’s fragile, unreliable, and unsustainable.

This call treats digital sovereignty as a research and engineering challenge: what would a sovereign digital research landscape look like and what does it take to enable, build and sustain it – technically, methodologically, legally, ethically…?

For more information, visit the official call page at the Lorentz Center website.