Utrecht University–NIOZ Early Career Scientist Symposium

On the 10th and the 11th of October, the fifth edition of the UU-NIOZ Early Career Scientist Symposium (UNECSS) took place at the Two Brothers hotel at the beach in Noordwijk aan Zee. The aim of the symposium was two-fold: to connect early career researchers working in the marine realm and to discuss the theme of the symposium, which this year was Open Science. It was great to see that people working on the marine realm in the broadest sense of the word participated: from paleontologists working on fossils from the North Sea to maritime lawyers, physical oceanographers, marine geologists, marine biologists, and many more. We enjoyed everyone's enthusiasm on day one during the poster session, the pub quiz and the drinks afterward.

The next day was filled with keynote presentations by Erik van Sebille (UU), Jeroen Sondervan (OpenScienceNL/NWO) and Peter Kalverla (eScience Center) followed by a panel discussion moderated by Mei Nelissen (UU). The 3 speakers presented their ideas about open science from the perspective of a researcher, a policymaker and a scientific software engineer, respectively. We think the keynotes were inspiring and gave plenty of material for the discussion during the panel discussion. In the afternoon we had workshops on Open access publishing (Daan van Loon, NIOZ librarian), Science communication (Sigrid Dekker and Charlotte Ballard, UU), making the most of your code (Peter Kalverla and Dani Bodor, eScience Center) and Fair data (Vincent Brunst and Aristotelis Kandylas, Geodata team, UU).

A personal takeaway from the workshops is that there is a lot of support at UU and NIOZ to help us navigate topics related to open science such as librarians, the Geoscience communication team, and the Geodata team, that we do not always find our way to. The people working here can advise you on how to go about publishing open access, communicate your science to a broader audience, or organize, archive, and store your data and code in repositories in a responsible way. Using this support at the right time can help you streamline your publishing process so you can focus on your research.

Altogether, we as an organizing committee had a great time during the symposium. We appreciated the input and the enthusiasm of the participants, the speakers and the workshop hosts. We are already looking forward to the 6th edition of UNECSS next year.

If you are an early career researcher and are interested in organizing the symposium next year, please reach out to us at unecss@uu.nl.