The various Open Science initiatives carried out by the VINCULUM project have been honoured with a YERUN Open Science Award 2024. Under the motto ‘You can be a Historian’, VINCULUM’s application brought together various examples of school and community involvement in local heritage research projects.

The VINCULUM project included an extensive educational programme fostering a “model that links in-depth research with humanities education, using research data tailored to students’ knowledge and interests”, especially secondary school students. The students learnt how to explore the data and were encouraged to produce concrete results, including a text, in the case of the ‘Cria Vínculos com a História’ competition, or by accompanying visitors to the historic houses, in the case of the citizen project ‘Vínculos com (a) História: à descoberta das Casas Históricas da Ribeira Lima’. They were also encouraged to reflect on problematic issues in history, such as identity, violence or slavery.

Coordinated by Maria de Lurdes Rosa, VINCULUM is a research project funded by the European Research Council, through an ERC Consolidator Grant, and aims to study entailment in premodern societies of southern Europe, in order to be able to conceptualise and explain the phenomenon. Entails were legal institutions that framed kinship structures and organised the transmission of estates, having developed ‘as a form of maintaining property within specific family formations, by creating a corporate body, administered by the chosen successors, in a horizon of perpetuity.’

YERUN is the Young European Research Universities Network and ‘brings together like-minded young research universities in Europe, with the primary objective of raising the voice of young universities in Europe via a dedicated strategic representation and lobbying action and strengthening their cooperation, maximising opportunities to collaborate in areas of mutual interest and benefit’. The YERUN Open Science Awards were launched in 2021 and aim to recognise and reward ‘efforts made by the academic community to promote Open Science within their institutions and beyond’.

In addition to VINCULUM, YERUN also honoured three other initiatives for their impact and innovation, one in Ireland (University of Limerick), dedicated to the sustainability of Open Science and its integration into existing projects; and two in Germany, one related to supporting and encouraging Open Science practices (University of Bremen) and the other in the field of neuroendocrinology (University of Konstanz).

Rita Hasse Ferreira contributed to this article