Bestor is an initiative of the National Committee for Logic, History and Philosophy of Science (National Committee), representing Belgian scientists in the fields of logic, history, and philosophy of science. It is one of twenty national committees of RASAB, The Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium, who also offers logistical support. The National Committee aims to promote research in the history and philosophy of science in Belgium. Bestor.be relies on a part-time scientific collaborator, an advisory board, and a network of historians and philosophers of science in the Low Countries. The platform is financially supported by Belspo, the federal scientific funding agency.
The scientific collaborator writes and edits most of the entries and stories on Bestor.be and manages the announcements platform, social media, and newsletter. Previously, this role was held by Alix Badot, Wendy Van de Camp, Walter Leclercq, Lyvia Diser, Eva Schalbroeck, Virgile Royen, and Hannes Van Engeland. Currently, Maarten Langhendries coordinates Bestor.
A network of volunteers, students, and academics also contributes information and texts. Many texts were reviewed and edited by professor and historian of science Geert Vanpaemel, now honorary member of the National Committee. Some French translations are made in collaboration with the translation workshops of the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation at UMONS. The editing of the French and English entries for the new website was partly carried out by Enora Scokart and Daria Gancarz during their internship in the History programme at Ghent University.
The Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities at UGhent is the technical partner that migrated Bestor from a wiki to a Drupal platform. Data were extracted, modeled, and imported into a Drupal database hosted on the UGent server and maintained by GhentCDH.
The design of the new site was done by Sitetrip (Ghent) in collaboration with designer Manon Gabriels of Wildbloei. The design is sober, professional yet light, inspiring confidence and readability. The color blocks and lines refer to index cards previously used to catalog library collections.