Organization and policy

Our organization
The core of the eScience Center consists of Research Software Engineers, who build on their unique disciplinary backgrounds and knowledge of the latest digital technologies, applying intellectual creativity to find solutions to the challenges they encounter within a project. 

The eScience Center’s Directors are responsible for carrying out the strategy and maintaining an organizational structure that allows the Center to achieve its mission. This includes the management of research projects and the internal dissemination of eScience expertise. Building digital expertise through networking and outreach is coordinated by dedicated community officers. The Board of the Netherlands eScience Center Foundation oversees the eScience Center while the eScience Advisory Committee acts as an external advisory body.

Where it all began
The Netherlands eScience Center was established in 2012 as an independent foundation by NWO (the Dutch Research Council) and SURF (the collaborative organization for ICT in Dutch education and research). Following a report on the ICT research infrastructure in the Netherlands, the Dutch government recommended the establishment of a national organization for the innovation of ICT infrastructures and digital methodologies. 

Jacob de Vlieg led the Center in the startup years. After a positive assessment, Wilco Hazeleger succeeded De Vlieg in 2014 and led the organization from 2015-2020. Since 2020, Joris van Eijnatten has been serving as the general director of the eScience Center.

Annual reports
Our 2021 annual report can be found here, and presents our key figures, achievements and project highlights from last year. Reports from previous years are also available here.

External assessment 2014-2018
Impressed with the level of its technological expertise, an international multidisciplinary committee in 2019 concluded that the Center’s research was of excellent quality over the period 2014-2018. It suggested several recommendations to further improve the visibility and impact of the eScience Center as the country’s national centre for research software. The assessment report is available here.

IP policy and open source policy
The Netherlands eScience Center adheres to the principle that academic research must be as open as possible. Results from publicly funded research are published Open Access, with all relevant data available as Open Data, and all software as Open Source software. 

The eScience Center is committed to making its software available in a way that enables collaborative Open Science, as well as use by private parties. We do this by publicly releasing software under a permissive free and open source (FOSS) license, in particular the Apache License version 2.0. Our organizational IP policy is available here. The IP rules for our projects is also available for download here.

Gender Equality Plan (GEP) Statement

The Netherlands eScience Center is committed to creating an empowered and inclusive research community with diversity and inclusion as a priority at all levels of our organization. Read our full Gender Equality Plan (GEP) Statement here.