Research Software Directory Receives Funding from Open Science NL 

In a push to strengthen the Netherlands’ open science ecosystem, Open Science NL has awarded funding to 45 projects aimed at building and enhancing national research infrastructure – the largest funding round to date under the programme.  

The Research Software Directory (RSD) will have a major role in five of these projects. This reflects the growing role of research software, open hardware, and FAIR-aligned tools in Dutch research practices. 

The Research Software Directory (RSD) is an open-source online platform, jointly developed by the eScience Center and Helmholtz Association, that highlights the impact of research software using a broad range of qualitative indicators. It is widely used by a diverse international community of researchers, developers, and research organisations. 

  1. Towards a community-driven and sustainable Research Software Directory     

Lead: NLESC 

This project proposes to expand the RSD with a peer-review mechanism for software, enabling it to become an alternative platform for publishing software. In addition, we will improve curation support for communities and organisations, and link to ready-to-run cloud instances and reproducibility packages (developed in collaboration with 4TU) to stimulate software re-use.  A community-lead governance structure will be set up that ensures long-term sustainability of the RSD itself.  

  1. Enabling FAIR for AI: Infrastructure for Transparency and Reproducibility of Research Software 

Lead: 4TU 

This project aims to make research data and software easier to reuse and reproduce, especially in AI. Currently, shared software often lacks the information needed to replicate results. The project will improve transparency and long-term usability by enhancing Djehuty, the repository platform used by 4TU.ResearchData and Nikhef, and the RSD to support reproducibility packages. This will benefit researchers, data professionals, and policymakers by providing better tools and guidelines for sharing and using software responsibly, particularly software associated with AI models. The project will also align with ongoing efforts to improve research practices and meet new regulations, enabling AI research to be more open, FAIR, ethical and reproducible. 

  1. Open-source hardware infrastructure for The Netherlands (OSHNED) 

Lead: TUe 

Instrumentation and equipment are vital for scientific progress, and increasingly developed as open-source hardware, aligning with Open Science principles. The goal of this project is to integrate successful open-hardware initiatives in the Netherlands into a robust infrastructure (OSHNED) through national coordination. This involves maintaining a centralised digital repository, based on the RSD, providing training, and identifying existing open-source hardware. The project will have three phases: setup, implementation and expansion, and long-term sustainability and refinement. On top of making hardware more accessible for education, exploration and reproducing scientific results, OSHNED can free up money annually for scientific research. 

  1. Project Hippocampus – A collaborative infrastructure for AI-Driven Science  

Lead: TUe  

This project will transform OpenML, a worldwide machine learning lab. This platform aims to share and create datasets and AI models transparently and collaboratively for the next-generation open science infrastructure. It will interconnect major Dutch, and international data and computing infrastructure, including the RSD, tohelp scientists across disciplines create AI models from anywhere. Much like the brain’s hippocampus organizes our memories, this platform will organize and store our collective datasets, models, and evaluations, and ensure they can be easily retrieved, reused, and trusted. It will actively engage with scientific communities, facilitate collaboration, and stimulate open, reliable, responsible, and reproducible AI-powered research. 

  1. LoFAIR: FAIR Data & Open Software for LOFAR  

Lead: ASTRON  

LOFAR is the world’s largest telescope operating at low radio frequencies, addressing an extraordinary range of science cases, from black holes and pulsars to extrasolar planets. However, LOFAR’s impact is limited because both the data it produces and the software needed to analyse it are hard to find and awkward to access. LoFAIR will address this by making the LOFAR data archive fully compliant with the FAIR principles and introducing a centralized directory for analysis tools based on the RSD . For a relatively small investment, this dramatically increases the accessibility of LOFAR to the widest scientific community. 

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.