Herman de Leeuw Title Executive Director Company Groningen Declaration Network Bio Herman de Leeuw, Executive Director of the Groningen Declaration Network (GDN), started out his career as bibliographer of islamic manuscripts, where he hit on the importance of authorisations (ijâzas) and the authenticity of documents. This focus on authenticity carried over in the next step of his career, at Nuffic, where he advocated the need for document examination when dealing with educational credentials. Moving to DUO, the Education Executive Agency of the Netherlands MOE, where he witnessed the transition from physical documents to digital data, he found that origin; authenticity; authorization; and access matter just as much in the digital age as they did in the manuscript age, and these lie at the basis of the Groningen Declaration Network.