Over the last decade, open data has become a hot topic that researchers and governments all over the world are eager to explore. The term first appeared in a 1995 document from an American scientific agency (Chignard, 2013), but its popularity increased when the U.S. president, Barrack Obama, signed the 2009 Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, pledging to achieve an unprecedented level of openness in government (Obama, 2009). This memorandum emphasized the importance of creating a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration through openness.@en

Open data portals are web services that serve as a central access point for all government-published open data and can exist at local, regional, national, and international levels. They are an important element of most open data initiatives that have enabled a large amount of government data to be widely available. However, data quantity and quality are not the only aspects that should be considered when publishing data. To improve the reusability of data and to achieve greater impact and benefits from open data, it is important to consider user-oriented aspects of the portal management, discovery, and use of data (e.g., organizing the portal in a user-centric way, providing accurate metadata, using a standardized and open data format, etc.). In this paper, we adopted the metrics proposed by the European Commission to assess compliance of the Croatian Open Data Portal with 10 user-oriented principles that open data portals should implement in terms of sustainability and added value. While the results show the government’s efforts in publishing data, some aspects such as better collaboration with data providers and other data portals, offering different visualization tools, etc. need to be improved to achieve active use and impact.@en