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The purpose of this paper is to conduct a usability evaluation of governmental data portals and provide a list of best practices for improving stakeholders’ ability to discover, access, and reuse of these online information sources.

The developed methodology was based on the comprehensive literature review that resulted in a benchmarking framework of the most important criteria. A usability testing method was then applied with accordance to unique requirements of open data portals. This approach was demonstrated by using of a case study.

The main found weakness was a lack of support for active engagement of stakeholders. The list of best practices was introduced to improve the quality of these portals. This should help to improve the discoverability and facilitate the access to data sets in order to increase their reuse by stakeholders.

The creation of appropriate open data portals aims to fulfill the principles of open government, i.e., to promote transparency and openness through the publication of government data, enhance the accountability of public officials and encourage public participation, collaboration, and cooperation of involved stakeholders.

This paper proposed a new approach for the usability evaluation of open data portals on national level from an ordinary citizen’s point of view and provided important insights on improving their quality regarding data discoverability, accessibility, and reusability.

The purpose of this paper was to draw on evidence from computer-mediated transparency and examine the argument that open government data and national data infrastructures represented by open data portals can help in enhancing transparency by providing various relevant features and capabilities for stakeholders' interactions.

The developed methodology consisted of a two-step strategy to investigate research questions. First, a web content analysis was conducted to identify the most common features and capabilities provided by existing national open data portals. The second step involved performing the Delphi process by surveying domain experts to measure the diversity of their opinions on this topic.

Identified features and capabilities were classified into categories and ranked according to their importance. By formalizing these feature-related transparency mechanisms through which stakeholders work with data sets we provided recommendations on how to incorporate them into designing and developing open data portals.

The creation of appropriate open data portals aims to fulfil the principles of open government and enables stakeholders to effectively engage in the policy and decision-making processes.

By analyzing existing national open data portals and validating the feature-related transparency mechanisms, this paper fills this gap in existing literature on designing and developing open data portals for transparency efforts.