Open Science Awards: Netherlands National Open Science Festival 2022

In the context of the Netherlands National Open Science Festival 2022 a call for Use Cases for the Open Science Awards was published, allowing all researchers and Ph.D. students from Dutch universities, universities of applies sciences, UMCs and research institutes to submit their use case. The Open Science Awards recognized and rewarded researchers or research students who have used Open Science to make their research more accessible, transparent or reproducible.

In 2022 the focus of the Awards lied on Societal Engagement, one of the key pillars of Open Science. The call was looking for use cases that explored challenges and difficulties as well as positive experiences and successful outcomes.

Abby Muricho Onencan and Kenny Meesters won the award because they engaged in methods for achieving societal engagement in the ImProDiReT project. These included:
• Citizen and community involvement in the generation of knowledge.
• Dialogue between scientists, policymakers and practitioners, entrepreneurs and community members during the research process such that they can voice their concerns, needs and aspirations.
• Citizen science and the co-creative participation of citizens or societal partners at any stage of the research process.
• Inclusion of other knowledge systems, lay knowledge or traditional knowledge within the research process.