Fellow Feature: Esther Plomp

Every year, the Netherlands eScience Center shares a call for applications for our Fellowship Programme. The Programme is aimed at members of the academic research community who are passionate about acting as ambassadors for the use of research software. It is for individuals who have the ambition to promote or improve the use of research software within their organization or discipline. Our 2024-2025 fellows are currently halfway through their fellowship year. What better time to showcase their progress over the course of their programme.       

We will present you with interviews with each of the Fellows. From creating tutorials to organizing interactive seminars, our Fellows are at the forefront of shaping the landscape of research software practices.      

Keep reading to learn more about the progress of the project, ‘Tracking Research Objects at the Faculty of Applied Sciences, TU Delft’ led by Esther Plomp, a Data Steward (Delft University of Technology) and Open Science Community Member. 

  1. What is the goal of your project? 

This project seeks to challenge the “publish or perish” culture by exploring alternative ways to evaluate research contributions beyond publications, such as software, data, and methods. Focused on the Faculty of Applied Sciences at TU Delft, it aims to quantify the role of these research objects and promote their sharing within the community. By monitoring open research objects, the project supports Open Science practices and adherence to FAIR principles, fostering a more inclusive research culture. 

  1. What initially inspired you to apply to the Fellowship Programme at the eScience Center? 

My project focused on a topic that I wanted to spend time on since I started as a Data Steward: making visible the amount of data and research software outputs that are shared, instead of focusing solely on peer reviewed research articles. When I started as a Data Steward at the Faculty of Applied Sciences at the Delft University of Technology, I did not have any programming skills yet (I began learning in 2019 through a Software Carpentry course). I, therefore, started checking publications from our faculty staff manually. Needless to say, this is a very laborious process, and I abandoned the effort after checking only a small fraction of the articles published in 2018. Only about 5% of the articles that I reviewed seemed to have data or software shared, so both the results and the work involved seemed discouraging. I have always kept the project in the back of my head, however, and when I found out that research support staff could also apply to the Fellowship Programme I seized the opportunity! 

  1. How is your Fellowship helping you promote the use of research software in your own community? 

My Fellowship project is helping me better understand how researchers share data and software, which will inform the development of guidelines that align with current practices. While many researchers are sharing data and software, it is not always done in the most visible way. By dedicating only five more minutes of their time, the visibility of their work would greatly improve. This is done by archiving a version of the data or software on a data repository and by then citing the research outputs in the references. By only placing a link in the article or mentioning the research output at the end in the ‘Data Availability Statement’ there is no way of automatically detecting whether there is an underlying research output available. By having a citation available for the research output, the output becomes machine readable and is thus more trackable and visible. This extra step of citing the research output, therefore, has a huge effect on the visibility of the output. Making the output citable and citing it costs a lot less time compared to actually preparing a dataset or software repository – so this step consists of a little extra work. I hope that by encouraging researchers to take this step and increase the visibility of their work, sharing research software will become more rewarding—and that those who haven’t yet shared their research software will be motivated to do so as well! 

  1. What have you enjoyed, thus far, during your Fellowship at the eScience Center?  

It has been incredibly satisfying to see that something I spent hours doing manually in 2019 can now be accomplished with almost a single click. I am grateful that people like Nemo Andrea and Azin Karimzadanzabi from TU Delft wanted to spend some time on this project, as well as all the hard work that Ewan Cahen did for the DOI workflow. Without them, this project would be nowhere!  

  1. What do you hope will change in the use of research software in your community after your Fellowship? 

I don’t think the project will have a huge effect on the use of research software, but I hope that it will increase the visibility and recognition of research software.  

  1. What would you say to people who are interested in applying for future Fellowship Programmes? 

Applying for the Fellowship Programme has made it possible for me to dedicate time to the project, and without the support of the eScience Center Research Software Engineers the project would be non-existent. Even if your own programming skills are lacking – which they are in my case – you can still have an exciting project and a great time during your Fellowship! 

  1. Do you have any links to workshops, events or outputs from your Fellowship project that you would like to share?  

During the Open Science Festival in Maastricht on 22 October I co-organized a session with Meron Vermaas (2024 Fellow), Nemo Andrea and my mentor Carlos Martinez-Ortiz. We wrote a blogpost about the session together with the session participants, which includes a summary of the session and the results of the short survey we held amongst the festival participants.  

All of the project’s developments and scripts are also available on a GitHub repository. In the upcoming months a version of this will also be archived on Zenodo, so that I can follow the proposed guidelines and cite the repository and the work whenever I write something about it!  

Who are we?  

The eScience Center is a research organization dedicated to applying research software to answer research questions in any scientific domain through project collaborations. It has the largest concentration of dedicated, high-level research software expertise in the Netherlands. The eScience Center also has a fellowship programme and makes all of its software and training materials openly available online. For more information about what we offer, visit esciencecenter.nl.