Postdoctoral Position Monitoring Enabling Environments Citizen Science & Societal Engagement

Postdoctoral Position on Monitoring Enabling Environments for Citizen Science & Societal Engagement

Leiden University was founded in 1575 and is one of Europe’s leading international research universities.

Applying is possible up to and including: 25 juli 2026

Citizen Science and Societal Engagement (CS&SE) practices are increasingly recognised as essential pillars of Open Science, yet they remain under-represented in monitoring frameworks and their enabling conditions are poorly understood. At CWTS/, Leiden University, we are seeking a postdoctoral researcher to lead a two-year research project developing the evidence base and monitoring tools needed to track, evaluate, and strengthen CS&SE practices across the Netherlands.

The project, entitled ‘MEECSE:
Monitoring the implementation of Enabling Environments for Citizen Science & Societal Engagement practices’, is funded by Open Science NL under the Dutch national Open Science programme. The postdoctoral researcher will be the primary driver of all research activities, working within an expert team at CWTS.

The purpose of this position is to design and conduct original research that produces a practical monitoring and evaluation framework for CS&SE enabling environments, a repository of enabling actions, and a consolidated evidence base of CS&SE impacts.

The research will entail:

• Conducting a systematic desk research landscape mapping of academic and grey literature on CS&SE enabling environments and impacts, to establish a baseline state of knowledge and identify relevant initiatives, frameworks and preceding work.
• Carrying out ‘snowball’ expert interviews with leading researchers, practitioners and support staff to gather inputs, feedback, and examples of enabling environment actions from across the Dutch and international CS&SE community.
• Establishing and coordinating a CS&SE Community of Practice (CoP) with practitioner networks (including CS-NL, OSC-NL, NEWS, SciComNL, and the five Dutch Citizen Science Hubs), and facilitating roundtable discussions and co-creation workshops to collaboratively develop value-led monitoring indicators.
• Developing and testing an indicators framework — the ‘MEECSE Monitoring & Evaluation Indicators Framework for CS&SE Enabling Environments’ — covering progress, effectiveness and impact dimensions of enabling environments and CS&SE practices.
• Applying data-driven scientometric methodologies to mine existing open scientific databases (Open Alex, Crossref, ORCID, OpenAIRE, DANS, Data Cite, NWO Dataportaal, CORDIS, etc.) and conduct a feasibility analysis of available data sources for monitoring CS&SE practices.
• Contributing to the development of a ‘MEECSE Repository of Enabling Factors’ and a ‘MEECSE CS&SE Evidence Base’, and seeking integration of MEECSE indicators into national and international Open Science monitoring frameworks.
• Producing pre-prints, journal publications and conference presentations, while engaging with stakeholders through workshops and dissemination activities.

You will work closely with Dr. Rodrigo Costas Comesaña (lead supervisor, CWTS), Prof. Uta Wehn (secondary supervisor and expert advisor, CWTS), Margaret Gold (expert advisor, Citizen Science Lab), and Dr. Louise Bezuidenhout (expert advisor, CWTS).

The Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences consists of five institutes:
Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Political Science, and Psychology. The faculty has approximately 7,000 students and 1,000 staff members. Within the institutes, not only education is provided but also groundbreaking research is conducted that pushes the boundaries of our understanding of human behaviour and societal structures. What makes our faculty unique is the diversity of research topics, the various styles of teaching, and the way professional support is organised;

this provides you with the opportunity to explore and develop your interests and expertise.

The appointed candidate will join an interdisciplinary team of researchers and data practitioners at CWTS from the Engagement and Inclusion Focal Area, and will benefit…