RDNL promotes FAIR research data by offering training and expertise for data support.

Winners of Dutch Data Prize 2020

Open where possible, closed if necessary

With the opening salvo of ‘Open where possible, closed if necessary’, Professor Luyben hailed the emergence of the FAIR data and more broadly the Open Science movements as transformational in the domain of scientific and academic research. 

Other contributing factors mentioned included awareness raising, skills building and the human-factor essential to curating open research data were noted in Prof. Luyben’s keynote speech about the European Open Science Cloud.

Having thus set the scene, the festive event proceeded with seven interactive parallel sessions hosted by RDNL partners and research data experts from across the Netherlands research data management landscape.

As in previous editions, the grand finale of this year’s event was the awards ceremony where the winners of the three category prizes were announced and had the opportunity to speak about their award-winning datasets.

Prize Winning Research Data Practices

Both the Dutch Data Prize and the Incentive Prize are valuable recognitions of researchers’ contributions to their own field and to principle of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data. While there are many routes to practicing FAIR data management, each of the winners had the opportunity to share some of the ‘behind the scenes’ details about their research and data management practices in a short address following their award acceptance.

Winners of the 2020 Dutch Data Awards 

  • Category humanities and social sciences: 17th century newspapers,Nicoline van der Sijs, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal & Delpher, National Library of The Netherlands
  • Category exact and technical sciences: STORM, Nadia Bloemendaal, Institute for Environmental Studies, VU Amsterdam
  • Category medical and life sciences: CoronaWatchNL, Jonathan de Bruin and CoronaWatchNL community, University of Utrecht

Winners of the 2020 Incentive Awards 

  • Category humanities and social sciences: MyMovez Project, The MyMovez Team, Radboud University, Nijmegen
  • Category exact and technical sciences: The Orchid Flowers dataset, Diah H. Apriyanti, Datamanagement & Biometrics Group, Faculty of EEMCS, University of Twente
  • Category medical and life sciences: SPI-BIRDS, Marcel Visser and Antica Culina, Netherlands Institute of Ecology NIOO-KNAW

Enthusiastic winners

Several of the winners spoke about how winning these prizes will enable them and their teams to make the datasets (even) more FAIR.  

Nadia Bloemendaal, researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at the Vrije University of Amsterdam, whose dataset STORM won the Dutch Data Prize for the category exact and technical sciences indicated that “…the prize money will be used to build an interactive website where users can visualize tropical cyclone risk for any place in the world.”

Nicoline van der Sijs of the Institute for the Dutch Language and Delpher of the KB-National Library of The Netherlands won in the category of humanities and social sciences. The crowdsourced research database of transcribed 17th century newspapers highlighted, in her view, the value and potential of combining FAIR data practices with Citizen Science as best practices. She expressed her gratitude towards the tens of volunteers who made the sharing of the data possible.

Based at Utrecht University, Jonathan de Bruin and his team are the winners of the Dutch Data Prize in the category medical and life sciences for the CoronaWatchNL project. De Bruin stated they are feeling ‘…encouraged to make recommendations for creating a FAIR dataset in crisis situations…which can be combined with the latest insights from Research Data Management, Open Science and Citizen Science’ so that data may be published in a FAIR, rapid and transparent manner when time is of the essence.

The winners of the Incentive prices were also very enthusiastic. Antica Culina from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology explained that the prize money for the would be used towards becoming a Core Trust Seal repository so that the database can serve researchers from around the world to find and share data about global bird populations. Winner of the Incentive prize in the category exact and technical sciences, Diah H. Apriyanti of Universiteit Twente, received the award for the Orchid Flowers dataset. PhD candidate Apriyanti indicated that she “…will use this incentive prize to do further research on orchid flower identification.” In a word thanks for this award, Apriyanti noted that the prize warmly thanked her supervisors and colleagues in the Data Management and Biometrics Group of the Faculty of EEMCS at the University of Twente. The winner of the Incentive prize in the category humanities and social sciences was the MyMovez Team from Radboud University Nijmegen. Dr. Thabo van Woudenberg, speaking on behalf of the team behind the dataset noted that “The Incentive Prize demonstrates the importance of making data openly available. In the future we aim to make this data even more accessible to youth, our main audience.”

Thanks to all

The celebratory event and awards ceremony were officially closed by Professor Luyben and the lead organizer Heidi Berkhout of DANS with a warm word of thanks to all participants, jury members, winners and RDNL partners.

More information

The presentations accompanying the keynote speech and parallel sessions may be viewed in a webbrowser by clicking on the images below.

Please find links to video recordings of the event via this webpage.