Monograph: Openness in science and higher education

The book “Openness in science and higher education” has been published – in Croatian  but the preface and abstracts are available in English – and presented at the PubMET conference  The book consists of 19 chapters written by 31 authors who are scholars and professionals from various fields and who deal with some form of openness in their everyday work.

Editor of the book is Ivana Hebrang Grgić, a Croatian scientist and information specialist whose primary interest is scholarly communications. She chose various authors that could provide the broadest possible insight into the state of openness in Croatian science and higher education.

The purpose of the book is to discuss positive aspects of openness and its impact on the development of science and higher education. This book presents all the opportunities that openness gives to science and higher education. By correct and controlled usage, open access information can significantly enhance all areas of human activity – it can, for example, increase visibility of small scientific communities, promote national science and education on a global level, raise the number of national and international investments, enhance the reputation of research and higher education institutions, minimize unethical behavior such as plagiarism, etc.

The Republic of Croatia and its institutions recognize these opportunities, and different policies on openness are incorporated into legal documents at national and institutional levels. Also, many regulations and recommendations encourage transparency, and all scholarly journals subsidized by the government are in OA. Also, the number of OA repositories with research and educational materials is increasing.

There are four thematic parts of the book. In the first, Open Science, there are six chapters: The Philosophical Paradigm of Openness in Science and Society; The Progress of Open Access in Croatia; Ensuring Open Access to Scientific Publications: Who, What and How?; Open peer review; Open Research Data, and Open Innovativeness: Indicators and Measurement. 

The second part of the book is Open Higher Education, and it consists of three chapters: Open Education and Open Educational Resources; Open Systems for Distance Learning and Open Educational Materials.

The third part of the book is Open Technologies and Rights Management in Science and Higher Education and it consists of four chapters: Open Code for Open Access; Open Linked Data and Metadata, Challenges of Open Access: The Importance of Open Identifiers in the Web Environment and Creative Commons Licences: Legal Foundation of Open Culture.

The final, fourth part of the book, Examples of Achieving and Promotion of Openness in Science and Higher Education consists of six chapters giving examples of one OA repository, three OA journals and two societies that promote openness.

The last chapter, which is the only one written by foreign authors, puts Croatia on the map of European and global trends in promoting and implementing openness. There should be no barriers in open science and open education, either financial, geographical, or any other. Even scientific texts and educational materials in “small” languages such as Croatian have become more visible and have more impact, helping Croatia to get involved in global scientific and higher education trends as well as economic and cultural developments.

Therefore, this book targets a wide readership – scientists, professors, students, information specialists, financiers, editors of journals and repositories, developers, and activists. The book is not yet in open access, but authors have publisher’s permission to self-archive book chapters into OA institutional repositories.