Serbia

Serbia started to follow the recommendations of the Berlin Declaration very early, so, for example, already on December 14, 2011, the University of Belgrade adopted a document approving the establishment of a repository of doctoral dissertations. Thus, since May 2012, it was possible to deposit doctoral dissertations in electronic form in the Fedra repository (PHAIDRA), within which the E-THESIS subsystem was soon developed for the Universities of Belgrade, Niš, Kragujevac and Pristina (Kosovska Mitrovica). Legal obstacles to placing works in open access were removed by the Amendment of the Law on Higher Education (2014). Then, in 2018, the then Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development adopted the Platform for Open Science, and soon the University of Belgrade adopted its Platform at the Senate session on March 13, 2019.

On the basis of these documents (and even before that), a kind of repositorization began, both at the University of Belgrade and throughout Serbia and other scientific research organizations (https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/repositories-in-serbia_701341#9/44.5523/20.7532.), and the central library and information system of the Republic of Serbia, COBISS, installed an extension of its system – dCOBISS, for depositing documents. In this way, all members of the University of Belgrade got, in a way, access to the infrastructure for providing open access. Numerous projects, events, conferences and days dedicated to open science followed, and the eScience project – crowns this multi-year effort: https://enauka.gov.rs/?locale=en. Eighteen repositories from Serbia are onboarded to the regional NI4OS Service Catalogue, three are onboarded to the EOSC Marketplace as data sources and one is onboarded as a service. Apart from repositories, three research services are onboarded to the EOSC Marketplace.

Serbia has a national Open Science policy – Open Science Platform (2018), which mandates open access to all publicly funded research outputs and recommends open access to research data (https://open.ac.rs/images/doc/Open-Science-Policy-Serbia.pdf). There are also more than 20 institutional Open Science policies: https://open.ac.rs/index.php/politika.

The inclusion of Open Science in the Law on Science and Research (2019) reflects the awareness of the importance of European developments in the area of Open Science along with the readiness to integrate the local research community and infrastructure into the European context. In a country such as Serbia it is crucial to provide access to relevant services, but also to ensure that the local services follow commonly accepted standards and are interoperable with international infrastructures. The purpose of the national initiative is to implement Open Science principles in Serbia by coordinating policy and infrastructure development, as well as training, advocacy and collaboration in the area of Open Science. The national initiative should also prepare stakeholders to interact with the EOSC ecosystem.

In order to have an effective implementation of Open Science principles, the Ministry established the Team for Open Science in Serbia (TONuS) in January 2020. TONuS includes a broad group of experts in this such as decision-makers, researchers, librarians and research-support staff. Their main task is to identify and define all improvements, measures and regulations related to Open Science, and to ensure that they are implemented in the local research community as efficiently as possible. However, the due to frequent changes in the ministry, the group has been inactive for almost two years and its status is unclear.

Bottom-up initiatives in Serbia supporting the adoption of Open Science principles include the Open Science Community Serbia (since 2021), which is part of the International Network of Open Science & Scholarship Communities (INOSC), an informal community of research librarians and the community around the conference Application of Free Software and Open Hardware.