Laurents is head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship (CDS) at Leiden University Libraries. The central objective of CDS is to support and facilitate digital scholarship within Leiden University, in close collaboration with other centres of expertise, with research institutes and with national and international research support organisations. Researchers can contact the Centre for Digital Scholarship for questions, consultancy, training and workshops on Research Data Management, Open Access, copyright, Open Science and Data Science.

Laurents studied history at Utrecht University and historical information science (Digital Humanities) at Leiden University and began his career at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences where he was involved in open access, data management, digital longevity, Digital Humanities, Research Infrastructures (DARIAH and CESSDA) and EC funded projects to foster data management, develop interoperability standards for scholarly communication and build technical infrastructures to enable Data Science.

Laurents has a broad background in the area of Open Science and is currently involved in activities to support the use of digital data by means of Artificial Intelligence.