We will share our lessons learned on how to engage students, staff, and management at our university with Open Science (OS). OS requires a culture change, which poses several challenges: 1) the organisation of support for OS that spans across faculties, services, disciplines and expertises; 2) to ensure people recognise the many topics that relate to Open Science as such.
In this presentation, we will highlight our process towards a flexible organisation of support for OS, and our approach to ‘tell the story’ of OS at our university, thus creating more awareness and visibility for OS.

Organisation
By organising support for OS at VU in a network across faculties and services, we combine necessary expertises and discipline-specific knowledge. Furthermore, this flexible network allows for easy collaboration and knowledge sharing among OS support staff and enthusiasts.

Principles
By focusing on the principles of OS, we bridged the differences between domains. We are all working towards more transparency, collaboration, equity, reproducibility and collective benefits, even though we use different methods. VU Amsterdam signals its commitment to OS by incorporating its principles in stimulating policies and support.

Recognisable storytelling
By using consistent branding for outputs such as policy papers, presentations, videos and brochures in which the principles of OS are central, we created a recognisable, coherent story. We set up a campaign in which the personal story of people using open methods at the VU is key, with videos in which people explain both the ‘What’ and the ‘Why’ of their work.