Shortlist Leo Waaijers Open Science Award 2025
Who will be the winner of the second Leo Waaijers Open Science Award?
The Leo Waaijers Open Science Award is a UKB award aimed at promoting Open Science. This year the Award will be presented for the second year.
The Leo Waaijers Open Science Award is intended for a person or group that has taken a daring, innovative and/or impactful initiative in the field of Open Science in recent years The aim of the award is to highlight Open Science initiatives and thereby encourage and inspire others.
Twenty-six high-quality nominations have been submitted for the second Leo Waaijers Open Science Award – six more than last year This demonstrates the variety of Open Science initiatives being undertaken. The jury assessed the nominations based on four criteria: bold, inspiring, innovative, and impactful/mobilising. On this basis, the jury shortlisted three nominations for the Award:
- Barcelona Declaration coordinating team: Ludo Waltman, Bianca Kramer en Cameron Neylon
- EnvisionBox team: Wim Pouw, Babajide Owoyele, James Trujillo, Aleksandra Ćwiek, Davide Ahmar, Šárka Kadavá
- ResearchEquals founder: Chris Hartgerink
De winnaar zal op 24 oktober met een korte ceremonie bekend worden gemaakt tijdens het Open Science Festival in Groningen.
Presentation of the shortlisted nominees
Barcelona Declaration coordinating team
The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information promotes community-driven action, based on a shared commitment: to make open research information the default. It asks for organizations performing, funding and evaluation research to (1) make openness of research information the default, (2) work with services and systems that support and enable open research information, (3) support the sustainability of infrastructures for open research information, and (4) work together to realize the transition from closed to open research information.
The Declaration was drafted at a workshop in Barcelona in November 2023. Over 25 research information experts took part in this workshop, representing organizations that carry out, fund, and evaluate research, as well as open infrastructure organizations. The Declaration was launched in April 2024.
Currently, over 120 organizations worldwide have signed the Declaration. In the Netherlands, the Declaration has been signed by six universities, as well as by UNL, NWO and ZonMW, Vereniging Hogescholen (VH) and the Taskforce for Applied Research SIA, the National Library of the Netherlands (KB), SURF and the Dutch Reproducibility Network (NLRN).
Together with other prospective signatory and supporter institutions in the Netherlands, the Dutch signatories exchange experiences, align strategies, and explore opportunities for joint action to make research information openly available and responsibly used.
EnvisionBox team
EnvisionBOX is a pedagogical open science platform that prioritizes accessibility by democratizing multimodal social signal processing and analysis through open-source tools, learning modules, and easy-look-up of relevant curated open datasets and diamond scholar-led journals available to researchers worldwide. Founded on principles of collaborative open exchange organized from the bottom up, the platform aims to transform how researchers can benefit from and contribute to open science. With over 30 practical coding modules covering everything from automatic gesture detection, 3D motion tracking, to speech analysis, EnvisionBOX bridges the gap between expert knowledge and accessible education, which is further supported by winter and summer schools. The platform’s community-driven approach has fostered a global network of learners who contribute modules, share experiences, and collectively advance the field of multimodal communication research. EnvisionBOX exemplifies the open science vision of breaking down barriers of intellectual and social capital between researchers and promoting transparent, equitable scientific practices, and we envision for the platform to be reused in other fields and to further grow by hosting lecture series, data challenges, open educational books, and much more.
ResearchEquals founder
I am thrilled to be shortlisted in Leo’s honor for my work on ResearchEquals. In 2017, process based publishing was merely an idea – five years of hard work later, ResearchEquals launched. Since then, hundreds of researchers joined to publish more than 250 research steps. Process based publishing is now possible, viable, and even desirable. Being shortlisted is an encouragement for the hard work to come – let this shortlist be an invitation for you to take action too.