National Initiatives for Open Science: supporting Open Science activities in Serbia and Greece

NI4OS-Europe, as part of its coordination actions for setting up an operational framework to support the overall governance of the EOSC, contributes to the activities taking place in partner countries for developing National Initiatives for Open Science.

In Serbia, NI4OS-Europe is represented via its project partners in the recently established Team for Open Science – TONuS that works towards the implementation of Open Science principles in the country. TONuS builds on the results of recent activities in the area of Open Science, such as successful APC discount negotiations, as well as the growing number of institutional OS policies and repositories. Its activities will be focused on a number of already identified areas of action, like OS-related education and training at all levels, open data, incentives for FAIR data practices, support to local Open Access publishing, transformative agreements with publishers, the inclusion of local initiatives and services in the EOSC, etc., seeking to devise measures and regulations that would ensure the implementation of OS principles in the local research community.

In Greece, a bottom-up Open Science Task Force (OSFT) has been set up towards creating a national policy and plan for Open Science. In particular, the task force has worked on defining the Open Science principles and policies to be integrated into the Greek academic and research ecosystem. The long-term vision is:

  • Ensuring open access to scientific publications for all scientific products resulting from public grants.
  • Supporting and promoting best practices for open and FAIR data and for open research software.
  • Continuous training of researchers in open science practices and integration of new skills in higher education.
  • Boosting the use of national research infrastructures and interconnection with the European Open Science Cloud.