As a member of the YUFE Alliance and an active member of YUFERING (YUFE Transformation of Research and Innovation through European Knowledge Transfer), the University of Rijeka (UNIRI) strives to actively contribute to a collective change in the research culture. One of the most important goals is to make open science the “new normal” and initiate a cultural change, which is an important part of opening up to a more transparent, fair, and inclusive research environment.
Within the scope of YUFERING, the University of Rijeka and the Centre for Open Science at the Rijeka University Library deal with open science tasks, and one of these tasks includes encouraging researchers to fully adopt open science practices during their research life cycle. To support researchers in this mission, UNIRI launched the Full Open Science (FOS) pilot project with a call to researchers to accept open practices. The objective was to encourage at least 30 research teams in YUFE to commit to open-access publications, open FAIR research data, citizen science, and other open science activities.
FOS lasted until June 30, 2023, which was the deadline to meet several mandatory and additional criteria to earn the FOS YUFE designation. Research teams were not required to fully engage in open science practices at the start of the call, but they had to achieve certain measurable results during the period specified in the call to receive the FOS YUFE designation. The FOS call was sent to research teams, not individuals, but an individual commitment to open science was essential for the entire research group.
5 research teams at the University of Rijeka earned the FOS designation:
- research team at the Faculty of Medicine, led by Prof. Marina Šantić, M.D., Ph.D.,
- research team at the Faculty of Law, led by Prof. Ivana Kunda, Ph.D.,
- research team at the Faculty of Engineering, led by Prof. Saša Zelenika, Ph.D.,
- 2 research teams at the Faculty of Informatics and Digital Technologies, one led by Assoc. Prof. Marina Ivašić Kos, Ph.D., and the other led by Assoc. Prof. Vedran Miletić, Ph.D.
All team members and their leaders became role models and ambassadors in the implementation of open science at the University of Rijeka, and in the field of open access and open science!
