Open Science NL Work Programme 2026-2027

Five themes 

The new 2026-2027 work programme is structured around five themes essential for the transition to open science: 

• Infrastructure provides the tools, platforms, and workflows that make it technically possible to put open science into practice. 
• Capacity building ensures that practitioners have the knowledge and skills to apply open science practices, use infrastructure effectively, and are supported in these processes. 
• Empowering communities ensures that shared practices emerge, where openness becomes the standard. 
• Incentives ensure that researchers who put open science into practice are recognised and rewarded. 
• Monitoring and evaluation provides clear expectations and makes it possible to measure progress in the sustainable embedding of open science. 

Development of the work programme 

The work programme is based on the NPOS 2030 Ambition Document and Rolling Agenda. Open Science NL also organised consultation workshops with the community during the Open Science Festival in October 2024. The main insights from these are published in a series of blog posts. Subsequently, Open Science NL advisory panels reviewed the collected suggestions and provided detailed feedback, forming the basis for further discussions with the Steering Board of Open Science NL, which ultimately approved the work programme.

Budget 

Open Science NL started with an annual budget of 20 million euros. As part of budget cuts, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science halved this amount from 2025. NWO stepped in and largely compensated the annual budget for 2025. NWO will do the same for 2026 and 2027, bringing the total budget for those years to 36 million euros.