Open Science and EOSC in North Macedonia: NOSCI@MK

NOSCI@MK is North Macedonia's Open Science Cloud Initiative.

The digital transformation in research is marked by the adoption of the Open Science principles focusing on supporting an open and robust research process and the development of the building blocks of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) that will provide the services and tools researchers need to find, access, reuse and combine scientific results.

What is NOSCI@MK?

Recognising the need for adopting the Open Science principles and joining the EOSC initiative, over 50 researchers from most universities in North Macedonia got together on 15 March 2021 to establish the National Open Science Cloud Initiative (NOSCI@MK).

The aim of this informal organization is to create a multi-stakeholder forum. The forum will play a vital role in the support of the OS and EOSC vision for inclusion and collaboration in North Macedonia. Also, the NOSCI Task Force drafted a Declaration that promotes the guiding principles of Open Science. It paves the way of implementing the Open Science mission by focusing on open publications and data and open services and infrastructure.

The NOSCI's first anniversary has been celebrated with over 100 researchers who have digitally signed the NOSCI Declaration. This provides the very much needed support to emphasize openness as a fundamental value. This will raise the quality of research and the autonomy of researchers.

NOSCI@MK is actively working on promoting the Declaration at institutional levels. A Memorandum of Understanding should be signed between the University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius, whose Faculty of computer science is a member of the EOSC Association, and all public and private universities in North Macedonia together with the North Macedonian Research and Education Network MARnet.

In this way, the major research community in North Macedonia will be together in the NOSCI. It will then aim to build a partnership with the Ministry of Education and Science of North Macedonia. The aim is to actively contribute to the development of new policies and legislation to incorporate the Open Science principles.

Future steps

NOSCI@MK acts as the focal point that spreads awareness regarding Open Science. At the same time, it keeps the community up to date with the EOSC development. NOSCI@MK organised several training events, mostly for young researchers. The idea was to promote Open Science and its benefits in the dynamically changing international research landscape.

The NOSCI@MK community recognised the importance of embracing the Open Science principles by young researchers. Therefore, it is actively implementing open research to ensure higher visibility and quality of their research.

Another NOSCI@MK team is actively working on bringing together the existing institutional repositories in North Macedonia by developing a Single Point of Access harvester. The harvester will enable researchers to browse and search all institutional repositories at once using a single web portal. This effort will effectively help reduce the fragmentation of available research data. In addition, it will actively support the creation of the “web of FAIR data” at the level of North Macedonia.

The setup of NOSCI@MK is actively supported by the NI4OS-Europe regional EOSC project, that provides the models and tools for supporting the establishment of NOSCIs.

Sonja Filiposka