Current State of Open Science in Balkan Universities

Open Science has been a relevant topic since the first introduction of open access repositories. Even though it has been 17 years, Current Research Information Systems (CRISs) are still being adopted and implemented to transfer innovation and research to industry and society. European Open Science cloud aims to solve problems with interoperability and fragmentation of CRISs and to achieve common standards for Open Science implementation in EU. Several reports show the current state of transition to Open Science in European Countries such as European University Association (EUA) report. However, the current state of research assessment in Balkan universities is not included in most of the surveys. The paper aims to fill this gap by investigating current situation with Open Science adoption in Bulgarian and Albanian Universities. The structure of the paper is very similar to EUA report in order to facilitate a comparison of these universities to other universities in Europe. It presents the spread of open access science; the state of progress to make research publications and data open, as well as challenges Bulgarian and Albanian university academics face to have an open approach to research assessment. In conclusion, it is shown that Bulgarian and Albanian researchers fully support Open Science and Open Access practices but most of the time they lack incentives and/or Open Access mandates on their universities. Both Bulgarian and Albanian institutions are still at the early stages of transition towards Open Access but very keen to support Open Science as the future of Research.