Universiteit Leiden

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New Research Support Portal: all information about research support in one place

Offering all information about available research support in one place is why the new Research Support Portal was built. Policy officer research Marcel Belderbos talks about the recently launched platform.

‘Research support is spread over many different places, from the faculty’s institutes to Strategy and Academic Affairs,’ he says. ‘ Many researchers know their way around informally, but sometimes it takes a long time to find the right answer to their questions. The Research Support Portal is meant for those instances where the existing lines are not sufficient. It helps researchers finding the right support or contact person quickly.’

Simple search path

The portal brings together almost all available information about research (support). From PhD candidate to professor: every researcher can go there. Belderbos: ‘While creating the platform, we thought about it from a researcher’s perspective. The information is clustered in three phases: before, during, and after the research. It is easy to search, for example by filtering by subject, but also by faculty or institute. In this way, the support is tailored to the individual researcher as much as possible.’

Better netwerk

In the coming months, they will further develop the platform behind the scenes to refine the current version. The main intention is for all the various support services to coordinate their work better. ‘One of our objectives is for the support services to operate more like a network,’ says Belderbos. ‘Many questions are not just about data management or communication, but transcend domains. We would like the various services to start thinking together about the best possible support in such cases.’

Another objective is to improve the platform by, for example, adding the missing information. ‘A platform can be improved when researchers use it and send us feedback. We would therefore like to know what they are looking for and how user-friendly they find it. I hope that people will really let us know because that will help to improve the portal.’

Personal advice

If you cannot find an answer to your question in the portal, for example, because it is very specific, researchers can, naturally, always send an email to obtain the needed information. For this purpose, you can send an email to researchsupport@hum.leidenuniv.nl which was created to help researchers as much as possible. Belderbos: ‘If a researcher asks a question via that e-mail address, we will look for the support they need.’

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