The spirit of openness in Belgrade during the Open Access Week: Conference The Application of Free Software and Open Hardware

The second conference The Application of Free Software and Open Hardware (Primena slobodnog softvera i otvorenog hardvera – PSSOH) was certainly the most vibrant event organized in Serbia on the occasion of the 2019 Open Access Week.

The conference was held on 26 October 2019 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade. The conference programme, divided into five sessions, featured invited presentations on a wide range of topics, including open-source culture and local free-software communities, WikiData, specific cases of free software application (autonomous driving, analysis of electric circuits, electromagnetic modeling and robotics), the application of open-source software in humanities (especially for XML encoding of epigraphic documents) and medicine, free education, as well as the relationship between Open Science practices and data quality. Special attention was paid to the introduction of free software in all stages of education, from primary school to university curricula. A whole session was dedicated to the gender gap in IT. Apart from academic staff, researchers, students and librarians, the enthusiastic audience included Open Science advocates, Wikipedians and members of local free-software communities.

Although the initial concept of the PSSOH conference (established in 2018) focused primarily on free software, open hardware and gender balance, there has been a strong accent on Open Science and Open Access and both this year and in 2018, presentations dedicated to these topics sparked a fervent discussion. Furthermore, one of this year's post-conference events focuses on Open Science: on 2 November 2019, the workshop Open Research Data Practices for Researchers will be held at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Belgrade.

Conference abstracts and papers are already available on Zenodo.