For more than a decade, the University of Cyprus (UCY) is actively involved in the promotion of Open Science. Via its Library and through the participation in European projects and networks, UCY is working hard for the establishment and implementation of Open Science aspects in the research community in order to take advantage of all the potential opportunities. Many actions have been taken place since 2009, when the University first started working on this topic.
The expertise gained through collaboration with international and local stakeholders returned with the ability to formulate the national policy, the institutional policy (adopted in 2022) and provide support for the creation of other institutional policies. In accordance, the necessary infrastructure and tools were created to support the policies approved.
The main challenge though was and still remains the awareness and the engagement of stakeholders as is about a revolutionary revision of an Academic culture of many decades. New norms to research and scholarly communication are expected to be established and implemented.
Towards this direction the University of Cyprus Library has set a series of webinars in Greek language to make sure that native speakers can easily learn, react and participate to any discussion related to the topics associated with Open Science. The webinar series are organised as part of the collaboration already established between the Greek and Cyprus OpenAIRE NOADs and it’s covering a variety of OS aspects including legal topics, services, infrastructure, policies, citizen science, DMPs etc. The main goal is to fill any potential knowledge gaps of different stakeholders including researchers, policy makers, funders, librarians and citizens/general public audience that are interested to the topic. The webinars are always open to the public and informal discussions are encouraged at the end of every session. Through the years it was identified that this created a community of people that consistently follow and find it a useful and easy way of learning about the evolving topic of Open Science. In addition, a significant amount of training material and recordings was created in Greek language and are openly available and easily reached through the UCY Library Institutional Repository GNOSIS.
The practice followed has shown that there is a lot of interest (image below shows an average of 110±participants per webinar) for – not only understanding – but also practicing Open Science in different levels and from different stakeholders. The University of Cyprus Library will continue to work and collaborate for bringing new horizons and to fully leverage emerging opportunities that Open Science brings along.
Reported by: Sylvia Koukounidou, Coordinator of Digitisation and Archives Office OpenAIRE – Cyprus NOAD, Library-University of Cyprus
