About
The Research Support Handbook is a project started by the VU Network Research Data Support (NeRDS) in early 2024. After planning and design phases, we launched the initial version of the resource at the Research Support Days in May 2024.
The Research Support Handbook centralises resources that VU researchers need to do their work. The Research Support Handbook also provides everyone with direct guides to change resources in case anything has become outdated.
Previously such resources were spread out across many different pages at VU Amsterdam and were hard to update. The Research Support Handbook is curated by us all, and reviewed by specialists. This way we can help each other.
Design
The initial infrastructure for the Research Support Handbook was built by Liberate Science, in collaboration with the VU Network Research Data Support (NeRDS). Early 2026, the website was redesigned by IM Studio. The new design entailed a restructured homepage and introduced new colours, icons for topics, guides, tools and for prominent pages like calendar, trainings and questions.
Editors
The Research Support Handbook is maintained by a group of editors. The current editors are:
- Elisa Rodenburg
- Jolien Scholten
- Tycho Hofstra
- Peter Vos
Editors tie together all the strings in this VU Amsterdam community handbook. We keep a bird’s eye view to ensure that what you read makes sense. Editors also help ensure the style and quality of the different pages are similar. They aim to keep the content relevant to the entirety of VU Amsterdam as well (faculty-specific information is not within scope). We welcome new editors at any time.
More information for and about editors is available in the editor’s guide. This includes the quality standards we apply to the Research Support Handbook and our GitHub etiquette.
Technical details
This handbook is created with a variety of technical resources. The main component for building the handbook is Quarto, a scientific and technical publishing system. The technical details page provides more information about what technical resources are used to build this website.
Contributors
The Open Handbook was initiated by Lena Karvovskaya, Jessica Hrudey, Elisa Rodenburg, and Jolien Scholten.
We want to specifically call out the following folk who contributed outside of GitHub:
- Diogenes Cruz de Arcelino
- Jochem Lybaart
- Jochem Nijs
- Rebecca Silva dos Santos
GitHub contributors
All contributions to this project are gratefully acknowledged using the allcontributors package following the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind are welcome! If you want to contribute to the Research Support Handbook, please read the Contributing guide first to see how you can do a suggestion for a change or for new content.
