With the Open Science Awards the organisation of the National Open Science Festival recognises and rewards researchers who have used Open Science to make their research more accessible, transparent or reproducible. The focus was on social engagement, with collaboration between researchers and people outside academia being particularly important. Twelve databases were selected from the submissions, five of which received an Open Science Award on 1 September.
Slave registers
One of the five winners is the Historical Database of Suriname and Curaçao, a cooperation between Radboud University, the Anton de Kom University of Suriname and the National Archives of Suriname and Curaçao, under the leadership of Coen van Galen and Jan Kok of the Radboud Institute for Culture & History (RICH). Together with a thousand volunteers they work on an online open database with demographic data of the populations of Suriname and Curaçao between about 1830 and 1950, which previously could only be found on paper. The so-called 'slave registers' are full of details about life events of individual enslaved people. Not only is this information useful to answer scientific questions about the consequences of slavery and colonialism, the archive sources have also been made available to a wide audience, so that the information can be used for education, cultural projects and family historians.
