Research institutions in Croatia are autonomous, but they strongly rely on national policies and regulations.
Croatian Rectors’ Conference adopted a document on scientific work evaluation and the promotion of open access to scientific information in 2015, which suggests academic and research institutes should have a policy that clearly promotes open access to scientific information as well as having scientific publications and research data in open access built into the evaluation system for individuals, project proposals, and scientific organizations. Therefore, more than a few institutional policies mandate open access. Primarily, Ruđer Bošković Institute, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture of the University of Zagreb, the Physics Department of the Faculty of Science at the University of Zagreb, and the University of Rijeka adopt an Act on the obligation to store publications into their institutional repository. Others adopted their own policies, such as Open Access policies of University Computing Centre (SRCE), Declaration on the application of the principles of Open Science for University of Zadar, University of Split adopted The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity in 2020. Most of these policies mandate OA to publications, including research and other data management.
Croatian research institutions can use a national repository infrastructure DABAR to maintain their FAIR compliant OA institutional digital repositories free of charge. Researchers from institutions without their own repository can use thematic or other large-scale repositories like Zenodo, FigShare, or others. Some institutions still maintain their own digital repositories based on EPrints software.
Some institutions provide support for OA and ORDM activities for their researchers. The level of support varies and usually consists of infrastructure, training for using the infrastructure, and creation of DMPs.
To the best of our knowledge, ORDM and/or FAIR are not systematically rewarded by institutions, but some reward OA to publications.