Frans Oort appointed Open Science coordinator at the UvA

As of 1 May 2019, Prof. Frans Oort will serve as the UvA's Open Science coordinator. This position has been created to shape Open Science at the UvA in a way that suits both the university and its staff. Oort will combine his work as coordinator with his present duties as professor of Methods and Statistics and director of the Research Institute of Child Development and Education.

Open Science promotes cooperation, transparency, reproducibility and public access to research results. The objectives of Open Science are to improve the quality of research, advance cooperation, speed up the research process, increase the transparency of research and the assessment of research, and make research methods and outcomes available to the public. Open Science will involve changes for researchers, for the organisation of research, and for all research-related activities. It will be the job of the Open Science coordinator to ensure that this process goes smoothly. Oort will be responsible for creating policies and provisions to help researchers from various academic disciplines transition to Open Science. In addition, he will be tracking national and international developments regarding Open Science and representing the UvA at the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) and the League of European Research Universities (LERU). 

'The UvA is fully behind the objectives of Open Science to improve the quality of research and promote scientific advances. However, the measures that must be put in place to facilitate Open Science must add value and must not harm the interests of the university or its staff', Oort explains.

About Frans Oort

Frans Oort (1963) has been professor of Methods and Statistics at the UvA's Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences since 2010. In addition, he is the director of the Research Institute of Child Development and Education. Until recently, he also served as the director of the Research Priority Area Yield and programme director of the research Master's degree programme in Child Development and Education. Moreover, in recent years he also chaired the University Committee on Research (UOC) and headed the working group on Academic Integrity that advised the Executive Board on integrity policy, research culture and scientific practice.

Oort studied Psychology at the UvA and obtained his doctorate there in 1996 for his psychometric investigation into the application of statistical models in behavioural sciences research. Having worked as a statistician and methodologist at Leiden University and the Academic Medical Center (AMC), he returned to the UvA in 2005. Oort has published extensively on his fundamental research into psychometrics and its applications in the fields of psychology, medicine, child development and education sciences.

This release was first published 16 April 2019 by the Uuniversity of Amsterdam.