End of 2025 wrap up of Research Services at TU Delft Library

In September, we announced some of our plans for the rest of the year. Here’s an update on how things have progressed

Research Infrastructure

The procurement process for a Current Research Information System (CRIS) is ongoing. Many documents have been written and emails sent! We still hope to have completed a new contract and in April 2026
Institutional Repository: Work is progressing on an upload facility. There is much behind-the-scenes work to develop workflows and design interfaces to allow staff and students to upload different types of research output (e.g., Masters’ theses, Green Open Access articles). Functionality will be gradually tested and introduced through 2026. As with many other repositories around the world, bot attacks are increasingly overloading our servers. Work is underway locally and nationally (via Surf), and internally to address this. Our user figures are at an impressive c.150,000 unique users per month – however, this includes dramatic increases in traffic from China and Singapore. These two countries account for 48% of the ‘unique users’

The Digital Competence Centre Call (DCC) for Projects 2025 has officially closed. Out of 32 applications, 11 projects have been selected to receive hands-on support from the DCC. Four of these projects—FERMENT (AS), Data Diversity Outside In (ME), Open GLASSLab (CEG), and WhereWeMove Data Dashboard (TPB)—have a dedicated focus on data management. For these, RDS Research Data Engineers will work closely with researchers to strengthen their data management and processing practices.
The RDS training team completed another productive year, delivering 16 courses and workshops to 311 researchers across the university. This included 8 runs of the popular RDM101 course, attended by 190 PhD candidates. The team also completed the RDM101 Impact Evaluation Study, which will inform a major course update planned for 2026. Additionally, the team collaborated with the Library Education Support team on publishing a new mini-module for MSc programmes: Planning for Personal Data.

A TU Delft Open Publishing text book van Bart van Straten, Bruno Bruins en Tim Horemans – Transitioning towards a circular (healthcare) economy. The book got a lot of traction and attention for its discussion about dependence on critical raw materials and the usefulness of reprocessing on Dutch soil
The Steering Board of Open Science NL decided to award a €300,000 grant to the network of institutional open access publishers in the Netherlands, known as the Netherlands University Presses (NUPs). TU Delft OPEN Publishing will be in the lead for this project in the years 2025-2027.

4TU.ResearchData’s FAIR Data Fund offers the 4TU research community an opportunity to apply for financial aid to cover the costs of making their datasets FAIR. The current edition of the fund is open until early January. Any researcher based at TU Delft, University of Twente, TU Eindhoven and Wageningen University & Research is welcome to apply.
4TU.ResearchData is leading a new project from the TDCC Natural and Enginerings Science (NES) domain on building digital skills training and lesson development capacity in the Netherlands NES domain. Over the next two years, we will work with institutions and networks (e.g., Carpentries coordinators, Research Software Training NL), to train new Carpentries instructors, support teams to develop new NES-relevant lessons, and establish regional training hubs to facilitate workshop organisation and ongoing collaboration.

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