Earlier this week, there was cause for big celebration for open science here in the Netherlands, in the form of the announcement of the 45 funded projects as part of Open Science NL's funding call for open science infrastructure.
It's difficult to beat the numbers: a total of 35 million euros was allocated to support a range of projects covering a broad range of open science-related themes. When it comes to funding open science, this is as "big league" as you can get. There is little doubt that the successful implementation of these projects will have a massive positive impact on the rollout of open science, even beyond the Netherlands. I'm genuinely happy for all who got their project funded. Fantastic!
In a separate and (in comparison) utterly irrelevant way, I have now resigned from OSNL's Advisory panel on Open Scholarly Communication.
Those two things are for me not unrelated, and I thought I owed people an explanation.
One detail from the announcement piqued my interest:
The budget of the funding round was initially 17.5 million euros. Open Science NL was able to increase this amount to 35 million euros through a one-off additional financial contribution from NWO.
I found this quite surprising, since it's not every day that an extra 17.5 million euros is stumbled upon. The explanation given is that
The extra funding comes from interest that NWO receives on money that still awaits a final allocation due to, for example, assessment procedures.
So far so good. Or is it?
Backtracking a bit, let us look at the evaluation procedure in more detail.
The call had deadlines of 5 November 2024 for preproposals, and 22 April 2025 for full proposals.
Let us put some numbers to it, for the sake of being quantitative:
Said otherwise, 80 out of 111 small preproposals (72%) and 34 out of 63 large preproposals (54%) did not submit a full proposal.
The end result of the evaluation was that 25 small, and 20 large full proposals were funded. This represents respectively 81% (small: 25 out of 31) and 69% (large: 20 out of 29) of the proposals submitted to the second round.
Well... who ever heard of 81% and 69% success rates in the second round of a funding application exercise? Does this really square with an effective quality evaluation? OSNL doesn't put the numbers this way on the announcement page. They mention 22% and 30% because they only compare to preproposals. This seems to align well with the NWO's published Strategy 2023-2026 . But the numbers published by OSNL are not the most relevant ones.
It's easy to look at what you see. But you should also look for what you don't see, here in the form of the 80 (small) and 34 (large) initial participants who did not send a full proposal, this decision being based on the initial assessment of the call. I myself was among those (one small, one large). Here is what the assessment of our large proposal advised:
Considering the very high number of proposals, the anticipated low success rate, and the assessment outcome of your preproposal, the committee advises you not to develop a full proposal as it considers the likelihood of your full proposal to be funded as very low. Please note that a large proportion of preproposals (89%) received negative advice due to the high volume of applications received relative to available funding.
OSNL thus, in practice, effectuated an overly radical cull of proposals based on very cursory motivations (it would be fun for applicants to sit together and compare the "Motivation" feedback from the decision letters).
Applicants who did not go forward with a full proposal were thus retrospectively duped out of the chance of participating in a call whose effective success rates ended up on astonishing levels of 81% (small) and 69% (large).
What should have been done instead? There are so many possibilities here. The simplest and best? Just open a new funding round. Isn't distributing money responsibly the one job of OSNL? Is it too much to ask of them to just do it?
So my personal take is that OSNL, when provided with the gift of an extra 17.5 million euros, just took the cheap, hasty and easy route and didn't bother with due diligence. Insufficient attention was given to maximizing the quality of the outcomes of the call. An extra 17.5M euros undoubtedly warranted a more considered approach (even if there was haste; there is always time to do a proper job). This is public money after all.
This latest item adds to what is for me an increasingly long list of disappointments and frustrations with OSNL. The fact that there was an almost total absence of active professional scientists in the jury composition of OSNL's call (I wonder: are the four Domain boards of the NWO really comfortable with that?). The fact that there is no single mention (let alone support for) Diamond in the recently-published Work programme 2026-2027 despite much trumpeting and virtue signalling on the web and on social media. The fact that Advisory panels are not really listened to, but rather used as post-facto-rubber-stamping and bottling up mechanisms.
Perhaps. I'm biased: I had skin in this game so competing interests abound. I anyway have a history of complaining about big organizations with big resources doing sub-par jobs. But I do feel retrospectively duped by OSNL. However, this is irrelevant, since all my open science-related work is entirely pro bono (so I don't need the money for myself). More objectively, failed funding applications however have very real consequences for real people employed by initiatives actually doing open science on the ground. Failed funding means that people can lose their jobs. Fudges, shortcuts, and casual handling of large sums of money high above, like OSNL just did, ironically seldom lead to redundancy high above. But down below, they do.
Personally, I have lost confidence in OSNL as the responsible organization for allocating resources to open science in the Netherlands. To avoid perceptions of self-interest, and to put my money where my mouth is (easy, since I don't have the money), I will not apply for funding from OSNL while its current leadership is in place.
I guess that as a scientist, I have a different perspective on how systems and organizations work best. Among researchers, we constantly challenge each other on what we do, say and write. It's a real pain in the whatsit. We are constantly subjected to quality control mechanisms which require massive effort on everybody's part. Though not always perfect, these mechanisms however demonstrably do tend to filter out the crap.
I feel that the tragedy of open science is that the real work required is done from the ground up, but the funding flows from the top down. While the ground level is subjected to effective quality control mechanisms, the top isn't. OSNL is mandated by the NWO, which is itself mandated by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science . Is everybody up there really happy with how things are going?