Abstract:

Open Science is as prevalent today as it was almost two decades ago when the concept was first introduced. In Europe, European Open Science Cloud has created a common standard on Open Science to be followed. Many reports have been used to show the current state of the transition to Open Science in European countries, but most of them do not include Balkan institutions.
This paper shows the result of a questionnaire disseminated in Bulgarian and Albanian institutions to capture the current state of the transitions to Open Science in Balkan universities. It discusses the view of researchers on Open Science and institutional research assessment. Technical aspects of their institutional research repositories are also discussed. The goal is to identify the main weaknesses on the road to EOSC and to plan relevant training and research activities in helping Bulgaria and Albania to join the EOSC initiative.
The current state of Balkan universities toward Open Science is captured, showing that researchers fully support it as the future of Research. A prototype of the first Albanian Open Access digital repository that will be implemented is described, as the first step to a fully-fledged Albanian Open Science Cloud.

Keywords:

Open Science, Open Access, Digital Repositories, European Open Science Cloud, Metadata