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Previous research on indicators for measuring the success of Open Science tends to operate at a macro/global level and very rarely addresses the need to measure success at the level of a single project. However, this previous research has the merit of arguing for the definition of indicators that offer an alternative to more traditional bibliometric measures or indicators that focus on mere performance. This paper is the outcome of work conducted for a specific project that aims to build a discovery platform for social sciences and humanities, the platform GoTriple. GoTriple is designed taking inspiration from Open Science principles and has been built through a user-centered approach. The paper details the practice-led work conducted by the GoTriple team for assessing the meaning of the term success for the project and to identify indicators. To this end, this paper proposes the concept of compass indicators and presents how the project team arrived at the definition of this concept. The paper also highlights a distinction between compass indicators, which are modest measures, and key performance indicators, which tend to be tied up with measurable objectives. Compass indicators are defined as indicators that do not aim to achieve a specified numerical target of success but rather explain the journey of a project toward achieving certain desirable outcomes and offer insights to take action. Compass indicators defined for the project embrace areas such as diversity, inclusivity, collaboration, and the general use of the platform. In the final discussion, the paper offers reflections on the potential relevance of the notion of compass indicators and closes with a discussion of the next steps for this work.

The National Initiatives for Open Science in Europe (NI4OS Europe) project supports the development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) by contributing to its portfolio of services, by involving national and regional research communities in the EOSC governance, by strengthening open science (OS) practices, and by promoting the FAIR principles (Macan et al., 2020; Garavelli et al., 2021) to help build the infrastructure and create a favourable environment for open and intensive scholarly communication.The main instrument in achieving this is the network of 15 national Open Science Cloud Initiatives (NOSCIs) established in the partner countries as national-level coalitions of Open Science stakeholders that have a prominent role and interest in the EOSC. The concept of NOSCI has been developed in response to the specific traits and challenges in the targeted region, based on complex and multilayered analyses of stakeholders, policies, and local contexts (Toli et al., 2020). Inclusive by nature, NOSCIs connect stakeholders from across the research lifecycle at the national level and provide not only a testbed for the formulation of OS policies but also a forum for knowledge dissemination and sharing.Drawing on a secondary analysis of the abundant data collected and materials produced during the project, this presentation focuses on the challenges identified as the NOSCIs were built – from data collection in the context of landscaping (Kosanović & Ševkušić, 2019) and policy analysis, through concept development, to implementation, testing, and verification (use cases). It highlights the relationship between individual challenges and NOSCI elements that address these challenges.The challenges are largely owed to diversities within the region, most notably the varying levels of integration into European structures (of the 15 partner countries, eight are not EU members), linguistic diversity, different research governance systems, policy traditions, and available funding. The framework for NOSCI development, the so-called blueprint (Toli et al., 2020), was designed in full recognition of these diversities. It relies on three modular workflows (Toli et al., 2021) and gives maximum flexibility to countries or national initiatives while making sure that all locally specific aspects are addressed.We believe that the approach adopted by the NI4OS-Europe team could be applied in other highlydiversified environments, as has been demonstrated by the NI4OS-Europe use cases, thanks to the flexible mechanism of interaction between challenges and responses underlying the very concept of NOSCI. The results presented in this poster were subsequently published in: Ševkušić M, Toli E, Lenaki K, Kanavou K, Sifakaki E, Kosanović B, Papastamatiou I, Papadopoulou E. Building National Open Science Cloud Initiatives (NOSCIs) in Southeast Europe: Supporting Research and Scholarly Communication. Publications. 2022; 10(4):42. [https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10040042] Interactive version: [https://open.ac.rs/index.php/ni4os-europe-pubmet2022-poster] Conference abstract: [https://hdl.handle.net/21.15107/rcub_dais_13397] Conference abstract: [https://doi.org/10.15291/pubmet.3952]