Netherlands

The Netherlands has made notable contributions to open science infrastructure, through its role in the origin of the FAIR Principles and through the Donders Institute’s early adoption of institutional mandatory data sharing. Dutch research funders and institutions have adopted open access and FAIR data policies aligned with European mandates.

Open Science Policy

The Dutch Research Council (NWO, Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) has operated a national open access policy since 2015 and coordinates Open Science NL, the national open science programme launched in 2023 as a task force (regieorgaan) within NWO with a mandate to establish open science as the norm in the Netherlands within ten years. NWO requires data management plans for funded projects and mandates deposit of research data in a trusted repository. Dutch universities and research institutes collectively operate under the National Plan Open Science. Dutch funders and institutions participated in the development of cOAlition S and its Plan S framework. The Netherlands Reproducibility Network (NLRN), launched in 2023, is the national peer-led consortium coordinating reproducibility and open-science initiatives across Dutch disciplines, working alongside Open Science NL and the Open Science Communities in the national open-science landscape.

Origin of the FAIR Principles

The FAIR Principles, published in 2016 and now widely adopted as a reference framework for research data management, originated at a Lorentz Center workshop in Leiden in January 2014, convened by a group of researchers, data scientists, and infrastructure providers working toward a common set of principles for data stewardship. The workshop and subsequent drafting process produced the Wilkinson et al. 2016 paper in Scientific Data that codified the 15 FAIR principles. This historical contribution reflects the longstanding Dutch investment in research data infrastructure and interoperability.

Research Data Infrastructure

DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services), a joint institute of NWO and KNAW, is the national centre of expertise for research data archiving and a certified trusted digital repository, operating discipline-specific Data Stations including one for Life Sciences. Health-RI is the national integrated health-data infrastructure, established in 2021 to make health and life-science data across the Netherlands findable and reusable, operating the National Health Data Catalogue and building the Dutch Health Data Access Body under the EHDS. It acts as the umbrella over BBMRI-NL (the Dutch BBMRI-ERIC node), ELIXIR-NL, and EATRIS-NL. ELIXIR-NL, the Dutch node of ELIXIR, provides bioinformatics computing services, training, and FAIR data support. The Netherlands participates in BBMRI-ERIC through BBMRI-NL, the national biobank network coordinating access to Dutch biobank collections including Lifelines and Rotterdam Study. The TDCC (Thematic Digital Competence Centres), set up by NWO and the Dutch academic community, broker investment into research-data-management projects across three discipline-based pillars; the Life Sciences & Health pillar coordinates FAIR-adoption and data-stewardship work, running a Data Steward Interest Group alongside Health-RI and DANS in the national coordination layer.

Neuroscience Institutes

The Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University (Nijmegen) is a dedicated cognitive neuroscience institute, with approximately 800 researchers across four centres. It operates a mandatory data sharing policy, contributes to EBRAINS and ENIGMA Consortium, and develops FieldTrip, an open-source MEG, EEG, and iEEG analysis toolbox. All Donders open datasets are deposited in the Radboud Data Repository (RDR), which absorbed the dedicated Donders Repository in November 2023. The Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN), a KNAW institute in Amsterdam, is the Dutch national neuroscience institute, conducting fundamental research spanning cellular and systems neuroscience, sleep science, and visual neuroscience. NIN operates the Netherlands Brain Bank and, together with Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Amsterdam UMC, co-runs the Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging, the shared advanced neuroimaging facility for the Amsterdam research community hosting the only clinically certified 7T MRI in the Netherlands. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam operates a formal university-wide Open Science Programme (since 2022) structured around five pillars covering policy, recognition and rewards, community engagement, support and training, and infrastructure, and co-governs Amsterdam UMC with the University of Amsterdam.

Population Cohorts and Biobanks

Rotterdam Study is a prospective population cohort established in 1990 in the Ommoord district of Rotterdam, enrolling approximately 15,000 participants aged 45 and over as of 2024 across three cohort waves. It is a major resource for population neuroimaging genetics, with GWAS summary data deposited in the EGA and linkage to the ENIGMA Consortium working groups.

Lifelines is a three-generation population cohort and biobank established in 2006 at the University Medical Centre Groningen, enrolling approximately 167,000 participants from the three northern provinces of the Netherlands. A founding partner of BBMRI-NL, it covers clinical, genomics, cognitive, and lifestyle data with biospecimen storage, and deposits genomics data at the EGA.

The Netherlands Brain Bank (NBB) is a postmortem brain tissue biobank established in 1985 at the NIN in Amsterdam, distributing tissue and neuropathological records to researchers worldwide under an open access policy. It operates three programmes covering psychiatric disorders (NBB-Psy), multiple sclerosis with post-mortem MRI (NBB-MS), and genomics (Netherlands Neurogenomics Database).

The Personalized Parkinson Project (PPP, “Parkinson Op Maat”) is a large-scale longitudinal Parkinson’s disease cohort run by Radboudumc and the Donders Institute since 2017, following a representative cohort of early-stage patients with annual clinical assessment, MRI, biospecimen collection, and continuous wearable-sensor data. Designed as an openly reusable resource, its data is made available to qualified researchers worldwide under a data use agreement. Participant data is pseudonymised and protected using PEP (Polymorphic Encryption and Pseudonymisation), a Radboud University cryptographic framework that encrypts and pseudonymises data so that even the storing party cannot read it. PEP was built for the PPP and has since been adopted by other Dutch cohorts including the Healthy Brain Study, and is designed to satisfy the pseudonymisation requirements of the GDPR.

International Engagement

Donders Institute contributes to EBRAINS and has been an early institutional adopter of BIDS for neuroimaging and electrophysiology datasets. Dutch institutions participate in multiple ENIGMA Consortium working groups. ELIXIR-NL contributes to pan-European FAIR data services through ELIXIR and its RDMkit resources.