Strategic theme 2

Visibility and Impact

TU Delft has an impact on society in various ways: through technological breakthroughs, practical solutions for the world’s problems and designs that contribute towards achieving a better quality of life. This impact goes beyond the campus itself and also encompasses the work of the socially responsible engineers that TU Delft brings forth. However, this impact is not always visible and cannot be taken for granted.

The Library can improve and reinforce TU Delft’s visibility and impact by making the knowledge and information produced by TU Delft as openly available as possible and easily findable for everyone; but also by offering our academics, lecturers, students and alumni relevant academic publications and study materials produced by others, which can be built on and developed further. We can use advanced analyses (including bibliometric analysis), to make trends and developments visible. Our colleagues can help in such aspects as decision-making on publication and dissemination strategies, potentially beneficial alliances or emerging research disciplines.

Once knowledge has been published, it is important to understand what value that knowledge may have for society. We can gain more insight on this by analysing how knowledge is used. This involves looking at traditional methods, such as citations in academic publications, but also the use of other (including social) media as well as reusing datasets, software, research methods and teaching materials, etc. In this way, we will learn which valuable knowledge we wish to preserve for the future and be able to archive more sustainably, both digitally, in our physical repositories, and in the National Archives of the Netherlands.


“Making TU Delft knowledge and information as openly available as possible and easily findable for everyone.”

The Library’s approach to this in 2020-2024 We will provide support to researchers and lecturers from the very start of their process. We will help them to find the right resources, even if these are not yet freely and openly accessible. We will assist lecturers in developing open study materials, such as open textbooks, virtual and augmented reality environments and videos for online education (including MOOCs). We will offer advice on the publication and archiving of many different types of research results, including articles, FAIR research data and software, and also provide our own publication platform. For optimum findability, we will ensure that high-quality metadata are added to all these materials and we will link our own open infrastructure to the worldwide network of search engines, databases and communities (both general and specialised).

Besides increasing findability, we are also working to improve visibility by exploring new forms of publishing, for example the sharing of publications that feature an interactive element, such as visualisation or simulation. We will adopt a pragmatic approach to this, in line with our organisational culture, demonstrating what is possible in concrete terms and providing scope to first take action, then to upscale and then, if necessary, we will draw up relevant policy.

Once TU Delft knowledge has been published, we will analyse its visibility and impact using research intelligence expertise and tools that we have at our disposal and are developing further. Our analyses are already being used in policy development, but this also opens up an opportunity for closer collaboration with our colleagues in Communication. We are already seeing success stories of how TU Delft knowledge contributes to finding solutions to societal challenges.


“We support researchers and lecturers from the start of their process.”

Visibility and Impact

Key action points for 2020-2024

Key action point 1: Making TU Delft knowledge easier to find

Key action point 2: Developing open access publication forms and services in order to improve visibility

Key action point 3: Analysing the societal impact of TU Delft output

Key action point 4: Identifying examples of success from analyses and in our network