Program Maastricht, 12 June 2026
Open Science Festival Limburg
PROGRAM MAASTRICHT 12 JUNE
| 09.30 – 10.00 | Registration & coffee | |
| 10.00 – 10.10 | Welcome and Opening | |
| 10.10 – 10.50 | Keynote | |
| 11.00 – 12.30 | Parallel session 1A Rethinking Legal Frameworks for Open Source: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Open Science Governance |
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| Parallel session 1B One Small Step for your Paper, one Giant Leap for Teaching: A hands-on workshop on exploring open science practices in education and turning your research output into reusable learning materials |
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| Parallel session 1C No more preaching to the choir: an interactive behavior change science primer |
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| Parallel session 1D From Silos to Synergy: How Open Sciences Drives Interdisciplinarity in a Large Consortium |
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| 12.30 – 13.30 | Lunch | |
| 13.30 – 15.00 | Parallel session 2A Auditing AI algorithms |
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| Parallel session 2B Open Science in Action: Stories from Open Science Grant Winners |
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| Parallel session 2C Preregistration for team qualitative studies |
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| Parallel session 2D Interoperability and Linked Data for Interdisciplinary Research: National Initiatives and Practical Perspectives |
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| Parallel sessions 2E Brewing Collaboration: Building a Network of Programming CAFEs |
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| 15.00 – 15.30 | Coffee & networking | |
| 15.30 – 16.30 | Endnote lecture on the topic of Open Research Information by Ludo Waltman, entitled “The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information – From promise to action” | |
| Signing of the Barcelona Declaration by Rector Jan Smits | ||
| 16.30 – 16.45 | Closing | |
| 16.45 – 18.00 | Drinks & Networking | |
ABSTRACTS
Morning sessions
1A Roundtable – Rethinking Legal Frameworks for Open Source: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Open Science Governance by Gabriele Cifrodelli, Assistant Professor of Intellectual Property Law, Maastricht University Faculty of Law
This roundtable explores the relationship between law and open source initiatives across diverse technical domains, including Open Source Initiative–inspired software communities, open source biology, and emerging open models in artificial intelligence. It advances a two-fold objective aligned with the Festival’s commitment to transparency, collaboration, and societal impact.
First, it addresses how to conduct rigorous and open interdisciplinary research where legal scholarship intersects with complex technical knowledge. Effective legal analysis of open source software, bioengineering platforms, or AI systems requires not only doctrinal and normative expertise, but also a grounded understanding of the relevant scientific and technical infrastructures. Participants from law, political science, economics, and technical disciplines will discuss research methodologies that combine legal analysis with empirical approaches—such as interviews, community-based observation, and document analysis—while ensuring transparency, reproducibility, and responsible data governance.
Second, the roundtable will critically examine open source as a normative and institutional model of knowledge production. Open source communities operate through shared rules, licensing frameworks, and governance mechanisms designed to promote access, collaboration, and collective benefit. The discussion will explore how legal frameworks can be interpreted, adapted, or reframed in light of these movements, which increasingly shape innovation in software, biology, and AI.
By integrating methodological reflection with normative inquiry, the roundtable aims to generate practical guidance for conducting open, interdisciplinary research while rethinking the role of law in supporting open and socially oriented models of knowledge creation.
1B Workshop – One Small Step for your Paper, one Giant Leap for Teaching: A hands-on workshop on exploring open science practices in education and turning your research outputs into reusable learning materials
Are you a researcher who also contributes to teaching through tutorials, skills sessions, supervision, or course development? At the same time, do you produce research outputs that can strengthen education when translated into reusable learning materials?
This hands-on workshop, facilitated by the Open Science in Education team at Maastricht University, introduces you to Open Science in Education and its practical relevance for interdisciplinary work. We will clarify what Open Educational Resources (OER) are, why open licensing matters for reuse, and how research products can become learning resources that are easier to share, adapt, and build on across courses and disciplines.
You will then use our AI-based Open Educational Resource Discovery Tool to quickly find high-quality, openly licensed materials relevant to your topic, and identify opportunities to reuse, adapt, or integrate them into teaching. The tool supports fast discovery across multiple international repositories, helping participants move from “searching” to “selecting” in a structured way.
The session also focuses on options to translate parts of their own research, such as figures, explanations, datasets, or methods, into an educational resource that can travel across courses and disciplines. Participants leave with a mini (re)use roadmap and practical guidance on publishing an OER.
Hosted by:
Team Open Science in Education, University Library
Akorshi Sengupta, Specialist Open Science in Education
Michel Saive, Scientific Information Specialist
1C Workshop – No more preaching to the choir: an interactive behavior change science primer
Facilitator: GJY Peters (Open University)
After a decade of grassroots advocacy, the Open Science movement has now been embraced by all major academic institutions, such as UNESCO; funders such as the ERC and NWO; umbrella organizations such as UNL and KNAW; and all Dutch universities (including those of applied sciences). As a consequence, in addition to local advocacy and lobbying at intermediate governance levels (e.g. deans, department heads), it now also becomes important to support the required behavior change of staff members. Behavior Change is a field on its own, with specific theories, methods, principles and practices. This workshop will form an interactive primer in behavior change science, furnishing you with the basic understanding of the causal-structural chains that form the core of behavior change. We will do this at the hand of acyclic behavior change diagrams (ABCDs), a tool that helps you map what needs to change and how you plan to make those changes. The workshops will make you reflect on your assumptions around people’s reasons for not adopting specific open science practices. You will also learn about ABCDs as an (open) tool that supports thinking about behavior change as well as communicating about your assumptions with others (such as target population members, stakeholders, behavior change experts, and other professionals).
1D Showcase – From Silos to Synergy: How Open Science Drives Interdisciplinarity in a Large Consortium
DACIL is a project whose aim is to promote autonomy and self-reliance of people with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) by providing them with an effective, artificial intelligence (AI) monitoring system based on voice and skin sensors and an AI-backed, digital companion that supports a personalized healthy lifestyle in the home environment. Such a big goal can only be achieved with a highly interdisciplinary team, and for that purpose DACIL involves partners not only from academia, but also from the industry and the civil society (patient associations). Even within the UM, the expertise involves a range from doctors to engineers and from data scientists to health promotion experts, creating a highly interdisciplinary team with huge potential, but not without its challenges in collaboration.
The project was written with open science values in mind, and it has from its start ensured that its research outputs comply with the FAIR principles. Data and related materials are carefully documented, curated, and managed to support transparency and long-term usability. Whenever possible and in line with ethical and legal requirements, datasets and publications are planned to be shared openly through appropriate repositories. DACIL not only aims to provide a tool for COPD patients, but also to promote collaboration and responsible knowledge sharing across the research community. In this interactive showcase, you will learn about the challenges in an interdisciplinary consortium, and how open science practices can help to create synergy across the partners.
Afternoon sessions:
2A Auditing AI algorithms
From the Dutch childcare benefit scandal to discriminatory profiling in Rotterdam, recent headlines have exposed the high stakes of algorithmic decision-making. Algorithmic auditing has since become a primary tool for ensuring AI systems being used can be trusted.
Yet, auditing AI systems can pose challenges different to those found when auditing systems in more traditional safety-critical fields. AI systems are often dynamic, their performance highly context-dependent, and their evaluations often require assessing difficult normative choices: When is the algorithm accurate enough to be used? What does it mean for an algorithm’s decisions to be”explainable”?
In this hands-on session, we will explore the practical challenges of algorithmic audits and reflect on its potential to help in holding organisations accountable for their AI use. Participants will step in the shoes of an auditor and evaluate the compliance of a hypothetical AI use case against norms from different AI auditing frameworks, hereby exploring challenges related to degrees of access and interdisciplinary collaboration.
In addition, we will highlight existing open access resources related to algorithmic auditing, such as auditing frameworks and algorithm registers, which may be useful for future research projects.
2B Panel – Open Science in Action: Stories from Open Science Grant Winners
This panel session will explore Open Science (OS) funding opportunities and the practical experiences of researchers who have successfully obtained such grants. The session will begin with a short overview of available Open Science funding schemes in the Netherlands as well as institutional opportunities at Maastricht University. Following this introduction, several OS grant recipients from different disciplines will briefly present their funded projects and reflect on their experiences with the application process, including motivations, challenges, and lessons learned. The session aims to provide practical insights for researchers interested in applying for Open Science grants and to highlight the diversity of projects that such funding can support. The panel will conclude with an interactive audience question round, allowing participants to ask questions about funding opportunities, proposal preparation, and project execution. This session is intended for researchers, research support staff, and students interested in Open Science practices and funding opportunities, particularly those considering applying for OS-related grants.
2C Workshop – Preregistration for team qualitative studies
Facilitators: Penelope Bollini, Yannis Stavrakakis, Szilvia Zörgő
Preregistration of research connotes publicly documenting your research design, including research questions, methods, and analysis plans. Although increasingly frequent in confirmatory studies, what may preregistration entail for qualitative research? What functions can it have within a team environment? During the gamified workshop we will explore the challenges and potential of preregistration, especially for collaborations accommodating different disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological backgrounds.
Additional information: If possible, please bring a laptop with you.
2D Interoperability and Linked Data for Interdisciplinary Research: National Initiatives and Practical Perspectives
Interdisciplinary research increasingly depends on the ability to connect data, methods, and expertise across domains. However, this is often hindered by fragmentation in data structures, standards, and infrastructures. This contribution introduces two emerging national initiatives in the Netherlands—the Dutch Interoperability Network (DIN) and the LCRDM Task Group on Linked Open Data for Research—that aim to address these challenges.
The session will briefly outline how interoperability and Linked Data function as enabling mechanisms for interdisciplinary research, supporting data integration, reuse, and semantic alignment across disciplines. It will also reflect on current developments, community-building efforts, and practical approaches explored within these initiatives.
The second half of the session will be interactive, inviting participants to share experiences, challenges, and needs related to interdisciplinary data practices.
Intended audience: Researchers, data stewards, research support staff, and professionals involved in Open Science, digital infrastructure, and data management.
2E Showcase – Brewing Collaboration: Building a Network of Programming CAFEs
The Programming CAFE initiative supports researchers and research supporters in building sustainable, welcoming spaces where coding skills can be learned, practiced, and shared. Our project focuses on three goals: (1) establishing resources for starting and managing Programming CAFEs, collected in the CAFE Playbook: https://code-cafes-nl.github.io/cafe_playbook/, (2) supporting institutions in launching new CAFEs and connecting them into a national network, and (3) developing reusable session materials tailored to NES domain skills.
In this presentation, we will showcase our first achievements: the launch of an inaugural CAFE, a reusable website template, a framework for session materials, and ready-to-use promotional assets. We will demonstrate how these tools help institutions and communities start their own CAFE and outline next steps in growing the national network.
This session is also a call to action:
Want to launch a local CAFE? We will support you (including financially).
Want to join the national network? We’ll get you connected.
Want to contribute teaching materials? We’d love your input.
If there is interest, we would be happy to continue the conversation and to explore practical next steps together.
Endnote:
The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information – From promise to action
This lecture will discuss the importance of open research information, highlighting the close relationship with ongoing developments around open science, recognition and rewards, and digital autonomy. The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information provides a key mechanism for collective action to advance open research information. Several examples of collective action in the Netherlands, in Europe, and globally will be presented. By signing the Declaration, Maastricht University is taking an important step in strengthening its commitment to open research information and contributing to a stronger, more transparent, and more inclusive research system.
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