Introduction to Open Science: Where are we heading?

This presentation provides an introduction to Open Science, its principles, challenges, infrastructures, and policy frameworks. It discusses barriers in the current research ecosystem, including paywalls, reproducibility challenges, peer review issues, and incentives in scholarly communication. The presentation introduces key Open Science practices such as Open Access, FAIR and Open Data, Open Research Software, Open Peer Review, Citizen Science, and Open Education. The presentation further highlights Open Science infrastructures, research data management, metadata standards, persistent identifiers, repositories, licensing, and research assessment reform initiatives such as CoARA. International, national, and institutional Open Science frameworks are discussed, including the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science and the Croatian Open Science Plan. The material was prepared for an introductory lecture on Open Science and research data management.