Development of Open Education and Open Science

The Declaration highlighted three key strategies for achieving this goal:

1. Active participation – Encouraging teachers and students to create, use, and share open educational resources.
2. Open licensing – Publishing educational resources under open licenses, such as Creative Commons licenses, which enable legal and free reuse.
3. Priority support – Calling on governments and educational institutions to give open education a high priority in their policies and strategies.

The Cape Town Declaration strives to empower a global revolution in teaching and learning, making education more accessible and flexible.

The UNESCO 2012 Paris OER Declaration defines OER as free materials under open licenses, calling on governments to ensure their access and promote support policies. The Paris Declaration was adopted on 22 June 2012, at the first World OER Congress, thereby gaining international legitimacy under the auspices of UNESCO. This declaration builds on earlier initiatives and more precisely defines OER as "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions."

Key calls of the Paris Declaration include:

• Encouragement to governments – Calls on governments to promote and integrate the use of OER into educational systems.
• Publicly funded materials – Appeals for all publicly funded educational materials to be published in a freely reusable format.
• Capacity building – Emphasises the need for capacity building among teachers and students for creating and using OER.
• Support policies – Advocates the creation of favourable policies that support the development, use, and sharing of open educational resources.

Both declarations were fundamental in shaping global awareness and policies related to open educational content, encouraging institutions and governments to adopt the principles of openness to make education more accessible, inclusive, and of higher quality for all.

Open access activities in Croatia began as early as 1997 with the establishment of the Croatian Scientific Bibliography (CROSBI), which had the functionalities of an open access repository. Since then, numerous national initiatives for open access have been launched, including portals such as HRČAK (Croatian open access journals), databases such as ŠESTAR (scientific-research equipment) and POIROT (projects), and infrastructures such as DABAR (national infrastructure for repositories), PUH (data storage), and the Croatian Social Science Data Archive (CROSSDA). It is important to highlight that CROSBI, ŠESTAR, and POIROT are integrated into CroRIS – the new comprehensive Science Information System of the Republic of Croatia.

Croatia actively participates in international open science initiatives, which is confirmed by its membership in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) since January 2021, with the University Computing Centre SRCE appointed as the mandated organization. Accordingly, in July of the same year, SRCE launched the Initiative for the Croatian Open Science Cloud (HR-OOZ) to create a national environment that encourages and supports open science. Additionally, Croatia's commitment to open science was recognized at the international level, and after the adoption of the Accession Roadmap at the OECD Council meeting in 2022, Croatia was officially confirmed in 2024 as fully aligned with the OECD Recommendations on Open Science and Access to Research Data from Public Funding.