Institutional Toolkit for Open Science Implementation and Research Assessment Advancement

To strengthen Ukraine’s war-affected higher education system, fully adopting the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science is essential. This approach will help rebuild institutional capacity, develop human capital, and foster innovation. Mainstreaming Open Science across all levels of Ukrainian academia can significantly enhance research performance, governance, and assessment practices, while accelerating digital transformation and reinforcing the knowledge triangle of education, research, and innovation. As Ukraine moves closer to EU integration, the urgency of these reforms becomes even more pressing. However, limited resources and expertise pose significant challenges—making EU-funded support and international knowledge transfer indispensable. National reforms must also be reinforced at the institutional level, as leadership and management at higher education institutions require clear guidance to adopt Open Science–based quality standards and workflows. This is crucial for implementing new approaches to research assessment and evaluation. In this context, standardized models and methodologies can play a key role in ensuring sustainable progress toward greater openness and transparency. There is a clear need for a comprehensive yet practical toolkit to empower this transformation. This document is a key deliverable in the project's critical Development phase. It builds upon EU best practices identified during the preceding Preparation phase—particularly those outlined in Open4UA’s “Recommendations for Open Science and Research Assessment Reforms in Ukraine”—and incorporates insights gathered from the National Open Science Consensus Workshops. The toolkit will be piloted at Ukrainian higher education institutions (HEIs) and will form the basis for institutional-level Open Science reform. This deliverable integrates European best practices with the expertise of the National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute” (KPI)—the first Ukrainian university to adopt an institutional Open Science policy and to appoint a professional data steward, a pioneering step in national research infrastructure development.