One of the main goals of open science is to increase access to scholarly research and its resources. While these goals of open science have been recognised globally, for example by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), not all geographical areas are currently represented in the discourse around open science equally.

Much of the literature on open science in international journals comes from researchers employed in the Global North, where adoption of open science has been facilitated through a mix of top-down pressures, incentives, and bottom-up initiatives. These also affect Higher Education, with many training programmes in open science being geared towards PhD students. More recently, open science practices have also been embedded in undergraduate and graduate curricula (Read et al., 2022), including our Masters programme in Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rijeka. Over the course of the programme, we have learned about open science practices and have applied them to our own research by sharing our data and code and documenting our methods in an attempt to make our research more transparent and reproducible. In addition, we strive to encourage similar engagement among fellow students and enhance their exposure to open science and its principles. Here, we present a project that is being developed as a student-led initiative for a specific geographical region that may benefit from such bottom-up approaches to complement existing top-down regulations.

India has made notable strides in advancing open science through a range of initiatives. These include the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), which provides freely accessible online courses, lectures, and educational resources aimed primarily at undergraduate and postgraduate learners. Another major initiative is the Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) project, launched in 2008 by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research

(CSIR), in which researchers pooled and openly shared biological and genetic data through a common platform. Additional efforts include EPrints@IISc, one of the earliest institutional repositories established in the country; the Government of India’s Universal Library Project, which offers free searchable access to nearly one million public-domain books along with digitization support; and the Delhi Declaration on Open Access, spearheaded by Open Access India (OAI), a community committed to promoting open access. India has also seen the emergence of platforms such as AgriXiv, a preprint repository for agricultural research.

Together, these initiatives contribute to the broader goals of open access and open science by expanding both access to research outputs and educational resources. Nonetheless, several authors argue that significant gaps persist in awareness, engagement, and the effective use of open access resources (Dhiman & Tiwari, 2022; Arunachalam, 2004). Therefore, relying solely on top-down initiatives is not sufficient to create long-lasting and meaningful change, as sustainable reform also depends on genuine conviction and awareness among researchers, which are factors that are often more effectively cultivated through bottom-up efforts. In the Indian context, where socioeconomic and research funding constraints remain substantial, bottom-up initiatives may be particularly effective because they can encourage cultural and behavioral shifts without requiring extensive financial investment (Scaria and Ray, 2018).
In Europe, student-led initiatives have been effective in bringing students interested in open science together and raising awareness of research integrity, different publication models, and reproducibility (Fitzgibbon et al., 2020; King et al., 2016). At the same time, student-led and community driven initiatives promoting open science are also gaining momentum in India. Some

of the bottom-up initiatives currently active in India include online journal clubs organized by student-led communities such as “Bioclues” and “QueriosiTea” under the broader ReproducibiliTea movement. Another example is the Psych #rstats Club, a peer-driven open science learning community focused on statistics and R programming, where participants ranging from undergraduate students to PhD scholars across the world collaborate, exchange resources, and learn together in an open and supportive environment. On the other hand, according to a report conducted by Scaria and Ray (2018), some of the reasons why people hesitate in sharing data and publication in India are the lack of awareness of repositories, fear of someone else using the shared resource for their own purposes, and thinking it was not important to engage in these practices.

Creating a space where awareness can be shared through community engagement can help further navigate through these challenges. Our student project aims to adopt a community-learning approach in which students, early-career researchers, and independent researchers are encouraged not only to access resources but also to actively contribute to discussions, identify local challenges, and collaboratively explore context-sensitive solutions. Drawing on Kathawalla et al. (2021), we incorporated several ideas that were relevant to the goals and context of our initiative. In its initial phase, the community will operate through recurring online meetings and webinars, leading up to yearly openly available workshops, and other community-led activities, followed by iterative refinement based on participant feedback and engagement. The author’s team is responsible for the initial organization, moderation, and development of resources, while long-term sustainability is envisioned through gradual involvement of local researchers and international collaborators in shaping and maintaining the community. The initiative additionally aims to foster connections between researchers in India and Europe, with the longer-term goal of supporting international and interdisciplinary collaboration across research communities.