Open Science Policy of the University of Zagreb
In a move toward advancing transparency and accessibility in scientific research, the University of Zagreb has introduced its Open Science Policy. The initiative aligns with European Union policies (EU Open Science Policies, EU Council Conclusions on High-Quality, Transparent, Open, Trustworthy and Equal Scientific) and international standards set by organizations such as UNESCO Recommendations on Open Science and global university alliances (European University Association) to which the institution is affiliated.
The policy reflects the University’s commitment to fostering open access to scientific data and publications, where the adoption of an open source approach plays a key role. It is also closely tied to Croatia's broader efforts under the Croatian Open Science Cloud (HR-OOZ) and the proposed Croatian Open Science Plan, both of which the University actively supports.
By integrating these international and national frameworks, the University of Zagreb aims to position itself as a leader in promoting open science, enhancing collaboration, and ensuring that research outputs are widely accessible to the academic community and beyond.
Objectives and Open Source
The Open Science Policy is key to unleash openness at the University of Zagreb. This document is supporting the following goals:
- increase the availability of research results, ensuring that scientific papers and data are available to all interested stakeholders
- encourage transparent sharing of methodologies and research results
- improve connectivity and facilitate easier collaboration among scientists, institutions and the wider public
- enable faster development of new ideas and technologies, thus encouraging innovation
- ensure the development of citizen science as a basic resource for tackling global challenges and as a key element in the development of a knowledge-based society.
Under point 6 - ‘Open source and other open outputs of research processes’ - the Open Science Policy says:
‘The university encourages the storage of the original program codes and other research results through institutional repositories or other publicly available repositories (e.g. GitHub).
Complete, up-to-date and correct code documentation is a necessary prerequisite for FAIR principles intended for programming code. Authors are also obliged to record research software and software code in Information system of Science of the Republic of Croatia (CroRIS)’
To name just a few of the projects available on Github: Multi-robot Systems course at Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, and PLT (Programming Language Translation) at Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing.
The University relies on infrastructural support from the University Computing Centre (SRCE) and its partners, particularly through the development of the Croatian Scientific Information System (CroRIS) and institutional repositories (DABAR). Thus, the Open Science Policy advocates for handling data according to FAIR principles, promotes openness in codes and other research process outcomes, encourages the creation and publication of open educational resources, and supports the development of open infrastructure for scientific information.