I'm hoping that, first of all, thank you for inviting me to this conference, we sympathize for Ukraine, obviously, myself having been a child of war, in a matter of speaking 30 years or so.

So, we're here for you and it's a great honor to be at this conference, even virtually, but I'm hoping to meet you all live Sunday. Okay, so why this talk? Why are we speaking about Croatia? Because, first of all, we are building a national CRIS, and as I understood, Ukraine is also aimed towards having a national CRIS built.

So, we're actually, I was hoping to show some of our good experiences with national CRIS, and all of the research infrastructure that we've put so much effort in, and combining all this together in a matter of speaking.

So, the idea is to share knowledge and, of course, to be available for any questions that you guys might have. So, right at the start, we have Sertze, that is an abbreviation of the University Computing Center, and in

Croatian that means the heart, and I believe in Ukraine you say Sertze, which is pretty much the same. So, that explains our logo, which has the heart in it. So, we are actually the research and higher education oriented company.

We try to build national infrastructure regarding data centers, network, all the computer and storage resources, but also information services, information systems as well, and provide all the kinds of digital services to our users. We are strongly oriented towards research and academia, and of course, no system can live by its own,

so systems have to have interoperability, also in the national level, but also in the international infrastructures and initiatives.

So, we're trying to be really a synonym for digital transformation of science and higher education in Croatia. Of course, we are much smaller than Ukraine and we cannot compare. I think we have like 11 times less people in Croatia than in Ukraine, but there are 227 research and higher education institutions in Croatia.

We only have like 20,000 scientists here, but for all of them, we're trying to build all the levels of research infrastructure, as I said before.

So basically, when we go from the bottom up, there is computer and storage infrastructure that we build, national grid infrastructure, which is part of the European grid infrastructure as well, high throughput computing and high performance computing services as well. We have a cluster that we started working

on it for high performance computing, started working on it like 20 years ago or something like that. We also have a public cloud, which is public only for our higher education institutions and research institutions, and we're building a huge national scientific and educational cloud, as we speak right now.

It is part of our zoo project. We call it zoo because it's scientific and educational cloud operation in Croatia. It's a huge project and it's funded mostly by the European Union.

We are using something like 25 or 26 million euros from European funds to build a national cloud, and basically it sums up to building five data centers throughout Croatia, and those data centers are strictly for higher education and research use.

So, on top of that, we're building services, obviously, from housing of other people's equipment to scientific software, high performance computing, cloud computing as well, storage data centers, etc.

So, but the hardware isn't everything that researchers need, so there are layers and layers of infrastructure on top of that. Basically from trust and identity. We heard some hour ago, talk about Edirome in the URAN presentation. So Croatia is one of the founders

of Edirome, I'm proud to say, and we alone have over 1000 locations where you can use Edirome as well. Our authentication and authorization infrastructure is also part of Edirome. So,

a lot of identities, children already in elementary school are getting their virtual identity in our AI infrastructure, and that follows them throughout their scholarship and research life, if they have one as well.

Other than that, there are various data infrastructure services. We have a national portal of open access journals, so all open access journals that are actually

in Croatia are part of our national portal, and it's a huge source of information for our students. Then there is a national repository infrastructure. We have 150 digital repositories for higher

education institutions, and there is like 200,000 digital objects already stored in that infrastructure.

Most of them are open source, or open access, I should say. And there is also a storage sharing service where every researcher or lecturer gets 200 gigabytes by default of space to share their own research data and everything they need for collaboration.

On top of that, there's another layer of information systems. I will not go into that because we're limited in time here. Some of them are aimed only for higher education, some for research, but you know that higher education and research are highly interconnected.

On top of that as well, there is our e-learning center, and we're proud to have open access and open education materials there as well, so we're putting an emphasis on openness, even in our e-learning environment.

All of that, actually, we use to build the pyramid of knowledge. The idea is to collect as much data as you can, organize it into information, and then provide data analysis on top of it. So all of that we provide for our stakeholders, and those are ministries, universities, institutions, various national agencies,

and everything. We try to actually enable them to get some politics done and to make informed decisions. And how does that fit into our CRISP? So we're finally getting to our national CRISP. We're building it as well. It's a single installation

CRISP for all the creation, and it's also a U-funded project. I think this is funded by some two million euros for several years now.

I will go deeper into what CRISP actually will contain, but the idea is to interconnect both nationally and internationally with ORCID, OpenAIRE, Web of Stioscopes, and every other institution, especially if we focus on openness.

So we're trying to gather as much as PIDs, DOAIs, and every other identifier that we can gather to be able to share and curate the data as much as possible, because we want this system to provide reliable information.

That is our primary goal. Then we want to promote open science with it as well, and to support decision making that I previously mentioned. So in the system itself, we will have our national registries, which is actually part of the Ministry of Science and Education in Croatia.

It will contain all data about the research projects and their financing, about journals and publications of creation authors, their citations, and probably patents and products if they have one that are related to the projects and publications.

Also, various events that are research-oriented and research equipment and services. So this letter is something that I will mention further on as well.

When talking about supporting open science, I mentioned already some of our services, but also we are a national research data alliance node. And our latest initiatives is, of course, aimed through EOSC. So we're actually

trying to establish our national open science cloud as part of EOSC initiative. So we have started our creation open science cloud initiative. As well, one of the main goals is creating a national open science plan and establishing EOSC as a NOSC, I should say, national open science cloud.

So we have gathered all the universities in Croatia, public funders and biggest science institutions as well into these initiatives. And we are actually currently building a national open science plan. So we are supported by the government, of course, with that.

And EOSC, as it was said earlier today, should be a system of systems. So one of those systems is going to be our national open science cloud as well. And when we talk about supporting researchers from computing services, which are actually low level

and hardware based through data services, which are kind of software based and database as well. So how does that play along with CRIS? So if we look at it, we

will have all of the equipment that is available to scientists registered into our CRIS. And all the services which are actually on top of that equipment and all other services that are not maybe equipment based should be also

put into the CRIS. And the CRIS will serve as a service catalog of NOSC. So that's our idea because a lot of, pretty much 90% of information, all of the information that we plan to have in CRIS will be open, will be publicly available.

Of course, we're respecting GDPR, that's why I'm not talking about 100%, I'm talking about 90%. But pretty much all of it basically will be publicly available. So those services will be actually at hand to our researchers, and we're hoping that our CRIS will be a one stop shop for our researcher,

a researcher who have their own profiles and everything which are going to be, and already are actually, connected to ORCID, to OpenAir and everything,

and be able to browse available services that are actually relevant and they can use it for their own research. So that's the idea. And those services are going to be marketed as NOSC services, propagated to ISC catalog as well, so they will be findable, accessible, and everything that I mentioned here is actually free for use to our researchers.

So we're providing infrastructure, and that is actually free to use to our researchers. How are we doing this? Well, obviously by using a lot of EU funding as well, and I'm glad to understand that Ukraine has already access to finalize in Europe and I'm positive that once this war is over,

we will be able to access much more EU funding and other international funding as well, to build both infrastructure and your CRIS as well.

All this, of course, cannot be possible without people, technology, Italians, Italians and Torus, these two Ts are actually people as well. And instead of a thank you, I just want to say I'm hoping to see you next year in person in Kyiv.