In this talk, I will present the small case of an open science community I belong to (the cogsci Master’s in Rijeka I teach in) and how one new community fits into the disjointed archipelago of open scholarship initiatives in Croatian academia. In the first part, I will describe how the new Master’s program at the University of Rijeka was built around the principles of openness. The program Cognitive Sciences: Cognition and the Mind started in the academic year 2023/24 and one of its core founding principles was to foster a community around teaching and practicing diverse open science. In the aftermath of the conversations about the replication crisis in psychology, we wanted to create an academic community of faculty and students that continued in depth explorations of open science topics with a critical eye. I will explain the structure of the program and share some of our experiences with teaching and reflecting on openness alongside our students. In the second part of the talk, I will contextualize this granular case of a small academic community in the wider structures and larger open initiatives in Croatian academia. In this wider contextualization, my aim is to show how a singular focus on either community building, infrastructure, or public policy does not produce transformative effects on the practice of science some of us would wish for. Science changes, for better or for worse, when scientists change.