On 22 October 2024, the first Leo Waaijers Award will be presented at the Open Science Festival. The Award is for an individual or group that has taken a bold, innovative and/or impactful initiative in the field of Open Science in recent years. This is an initiative of UKB, the partnership of the 13 university libraries and the Royal Library of the Netherlands. The aim of the award is to highlight Open Science initiatives and thereby encourage and inspire others. For this Award, we ask for nominations to be sent in. This new Award will be awarded periodically.

Procedure

Complete the Nomination form in full by September 1 and send it to ukb@remove-this.uu.nl.  You can nominate yourself or someone else.

The jury will announce a first selection of nominations in mid-September, based on the criteria below. The winner will be announced on 22 October at the Open Science Festival in Maastricht. The jury consists of Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer (UvA), Hubert Krekels (WUR) and Maurits van der Graaf (Pleiade).

Criteria for the Award

• The Open Science initiative is (at least partly) of Dutch origin (an internationally focused initiative is allowed, of course);
• The initiative is not older than 5 years;
• Criteria for assessing the Open Science initiative: bold and/or inspiring and/or innovative and/or impactful.

The prize consists of a memento. The prize winner will be communicated widely.

For questions, please contact Maurits van der Graaf

In the footsteps of Leo Waaijers

Leo Waaijers (1938 – 2023) was a tireless fighter for Open Access and for restoring the balance of power between public and private actors in the scientific domain. Leo was very active in the scientific information world for 35 years, bombarding it with innovative ideas, proposals and action plans. He did this from various positions, including as university librarian at TU Delft and at Wageningen University & Research, as manager at the SURF platform ICT and research, as Open Access consultant and employee of the CWTS. Leo scored national and international acclaim for setting up the successful ‘Cream of Science’, an initiative to give a quality boost to universities’ Open Access repositories by asking 200 leading scientists to make all their scientific publications available for it. After this, Leo turned his attention to the scientific publishing process itself and founded QOAM – intended to let the quality of a journal be determined by the authors themselves and thus break the dominance of the ‘journal impact factor’. Tireless as ever, he and CWTS colleagues published another plea to build a publishing infrastructure outside publishers two months before his unexpected death. With the Leo Waaijers Award, UKB wants to inspire others to follow in his footsteps.