ACCEPTING OPENNESS IN SCIENCE AND EDUCATION

The foundation of this work is in the initiative of open access to scientific information (Budapest and Berlin Declaration and Panton principle) as well as in the Paris Declaration on Open Educational Resources (OER). The focus of this paper is on the use of open access to scientific and educational content in academic community, both in terms of consumption and active participation or publication. Open access publishing can be provided in two ways: “golden” (electronic journals) and “green” (based on self-archiving; e.g. repositories). When it comes to OER, the basic guideline is to realize the right to information and education for everyone, which is essential for the knowledge society. We should distinguish open educational resources from open e-courses and open education. OER characteristics are: availability in digital format, availability for free downloading, using, copying, modifying, redistributing and sharing for the purpose of teaching, learning and research, and is most often distributed through Creative Commons license. This paper presents results of a pilot-study conducted at some higher education institutions in Croatia aiming at determining the prevalence of the use of openly available publication of scientific and educational resources compared to those with limited access. It has been shown that the respondents from the Polytechnics achieve higher levels of availability of educational resources than those at the Universities. The study results indicate that for the purpose of personal training and development, informational resources with open access have been more used than the limited ones, but the papers are published more often in limited than in the open access publications. For a wider acceptance of open access in the academic community a strategic planning at institutional and national level is necessary.