Majority of Croatian institutional repositories are hosted on the national repository infrastructure Dabar (Digital academic archives and repositories). Dabar is a centrally implemented technological solution based on open-source software Islandora. It provides Croatian researchers free, reliable, and interoperable digital repository infrastructure for archiving publications, AV materials as well as research data. It was developed through a collaboration of many Croatian institutions and provided as a technological service by SRCE. In December 2021 it hosted 150 active institutional repositories and 6 aggregated repositories. However, the majority of institutional repositories hosted on DABAR are still focused on archiving dissertations and theses, and more than half of all documents archived in all institutional repositories are available in OA.
Besides institutional repositories hosted on DABAR, there are still a few, but very important institutional repositories using mostly EPrints solution and focusing more on archiving research publications and not only dissertations and theses. The two repositories with most archived research papers are the Full-text institutional repository of the Ruđer Bošković Institute – FULIR and the Faculty of Science of the University of Zagreb repository with the majority of archived papers available in OA. While the Faculty of Science repository is part of DABAR, migration of FULIR to the DABAR infrastructure is planned for the future.
Portal of Croatian Scientific and Professional Journals - Hrčak is an OA publishing platform hosting over 500 Croatian OA journals and providing access to more than 248,000 full-text articles.
Croatian Scientific Bibliography – CROSBI is a Croatian national scientific bibliography which aims to gather information about all scientific and professional publications published by Croatian authors, to organize that information and put it into context by relating publications with their Croatian authors, institutions, projects and scientific fields. As such, CROSBI can be regarded as a repository, making it the oldest OA repository in Croatia. It launched in 1997, and by the end of 2021 has gathered metadata of more than 720.000 publications.
Šestar (Pair of Compasses), launched in 2006, is a database of scientific instruments. Šestar is part of the e-infrastructure for the Croatian academic and research community whose purpose is to record and describe equipment for research conducted at Croatian public science and higher education institutions. The main goals are to improve the usage of existing scientific equipment, to encourage cooperation between scientific institutions and scientists,and between science and the economy, and to increase the transparency of the research in Croatia. Today, Šestar stores data on 3,100 scientific instruments.
Database of project activities in science and higher education in the Republic of Croatia – POIROT was launched in 2016 as an information service collecting data on all scientific and professional projects involving employees and institutions of science and higher education of Croatia. The records on projects in POIROT are additionally connected with Croatian scientific and higher education institutions and persons cooperating on these projects, which enables projects participation reports in projects on those levels.
Who’s Who in CROSBI gathers data on Croatian researchers offering comprehensive information including a biography, bibliography, education, employment, career advancements, awards, working experience, memberships, research interests, expertise, intramural and extramural activities, and other skills and hobbies. The main goal is to increase the visibility of Croatian researchers and to enhance collaboration among researchers and communication between scientists and the public.
In collaboration with RBI, SRCE is currently developing a national research information system - CroRIS, as part of the strategic project Scientific and Technological Foresight. Aiming to enable and promote OS in a way that enables visibility, transparency and public availability of research projects and achieved results, CroRIS will integrate information from existing databases (such as CROSBI, Who is who in CROSBI, Šestar and POIROT) and upgrade it into a unique and sustainable information system. CroRIS ensures openness and interoperability with other national and international systems (such as OpenAIRE, ORCID, etc.) through separate application programming interfaces.
All repositories using Dabar infrastructure are compatible with the OpenAIRE Guidelines (v3). This means that researchers can comply with Article 29.2 of the H2020 grant agreement regarding open access to articles with depositing into Croatian repositories. In August 2020 OpenAIRE included 64 institutional repositories, 1 journal repository – Hrčak, 136 journals, RBI's repository FULIR and RBI’s database about scientific projects - POIROT which is used by the OpenAIRE as an authority file for projects funded by Croatian funders. In July 2021 CROSBI was upgraded and aligned with the latest OpenAIRE interoperability guidelines (OpenAIRE Guidelines v4) and the records from CROSBI became available through OpenAIRE Explore.