TOP PhD

Often, the research output of a PhD student is almost exclusively measured by the number of publications. Other forms of output, such as software, data and methodology are not counted, although they are highly valuable to the scientific community: as they can be shared, reused and combined by other researchers, leading to new insights beyond the original scope of the research. Therefore, the University of Twente introduces an Open Science PhD thesis that focuses on open-science output rather than traditional publications. The thesis will review all open-science research output: open access (publications), open science tools (contributions of code to open-source projects), open data (freely available data-sets) and open reproducible research (meta data, full details of methodology). See https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/foster#taxonomy for a formal definition of open-science areas.

The thesis would combine various elements including: preprints and/or (draft of) scientific publications, descriptions of data-sets that are publicly available, methodology of data collection and descriptions of contributions to open-sources codes (including design decisions). The aim of the open-science thesis is to disseminate all research output of the PhD for reuse rather than only the publications. This will reduce the focus on the traditional ‘paper’ publications and encourage FAIR and open research data management (RDM).