Using open data for research assessment in the Netherlands

In 2023, psychological research at a consortium of eight Dutch universities was evaluated following the Strategy Evaluation Protocol (SEP). The SEP lays out the procedure and requirements to evaluate research at Dutch public institutions, similar to the Research Excellence Framework in the UK. The research intelligence (RI) team at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam provided support in the preparation of the joint assessment.

The consortium, following a proposal from the RI team, decided to combine closed data from local research information systems with open metadata from OpenAlex for a bibliometric analysis of its research output. In this presentation, I will describe why and how we came to this decision; what problems we encountered and how we solved them (or didn’t); present some of the analyses we did; and discuss the reactions from the consortium and the assessment committee to the analysis, all focusing on the use of open data.

This case shows how using open research information need not be an all-or-nothing decision. By combining open and closed data, it is possible to manage discussions about reliability and quality of new open data sources, while at the same familiarising a new group of people with these sources and the benefits that they can bring.

The presentation is available online at https://mtthsdzwn.github.io/20240923-Sorbonne/