Project VINCULUM was one of four initiatives chosen as recipients of the YERUN Open Science Awards 2024. The selected proposal, ‘You can be a historian: opening academic research to schools and communities through students’ engagement in local heritage’,  presents VINCULUM’s educational programme for secondary students, which aimed to link scientific production with the teaching of humanities, encouraging the use of research results based on challenges suited to the students’ knowledge and interests.

VINCULUM – Entailing Perpetuity: Family, Power, Identity. The Social Agency of a Corporate Body (Southern Europe, 14th-17th Centuries) is a five-year research project (2019-2024) funded by the European Research Council through an ERC Consolidator Grant awarded to Maria de Lurdes Rosa, IHC – NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST researcher. The project’s goal was to ‘deeply and extensively’ study entailment – a legal institution that framed kinship structures and organized heritage transmission, mainly by benefitting the eldest male son and by preventing lineage voids and breaks –, and reframe it theoretically.

Considering the educational importance of discovering heritage, two pilot projects were defined: the competition ‘Cria Vínculos com a História’ and the citizenship activity ‘Vínculos com (a) História: à descoberta das Casas Históricas da Ribeira Lima‘ [‘Entailments with (a) History: discovering the historic houses of the Lima creek’]. In both cases, the team provided research data to students, in collaboration with teachers and local heritage experts.

The students were taught how to explore the data and encouraged to produce concrete results, including a short text in the case of the competition; in the second case, they accompanied visitors to the historic houses. They were also encouraged to reflect on problematic issues in history, such as identity, violence or enslavement.

Besides VINCULUM, YERUN honoured three more initiatives for their impact and innovation, one in Ireland (University of Limerick), devoted to the sustainability of open science and its integration in pre-existing projects; and two other in Germany, one related to the support and incentive to open science practices (University of Bremen) and the other in the area of neuroendocrinology (University of Konstanz).

The Young European Research Universities Network (YERUN) was created in 2015, bringing together young universities in Europe. Inspired by a similar prize promoted by the University of Reading (United Kingdom), YERUN Open Science Awards were launched in 2021 ‘to recognise and reward efforts made by the academic community to promote open science within their institutions and beyond.’