This is the complete dataset about Croatian 2017 publications indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection citation indexes (WoSCC) (SCIEXP, SSCI, AHCI, and ESCI), their OA status as well as data about Croatian journals indexed in WoSCC which are analyzed in the publication: Macan, B., Škorić, L. & Petrak, J. (2020) David among Goliaths: Open access publishing in scientific (semi-)periphery. Learned Publishing, 33 (4), 410-417 doi:10.1002/leap.1320. This case study analyses data on papers of Croatian authors published in 2017 from four WoSCC citation indexes (SCIEXP, SSCI, AHCI, and ESCI). The primary dataset (5,176 articles and reviews) was divided into two subsets, the open access (OA) subset (2,964 papers) and non-OA subset (2, 212 papers). We also used the primary dataset to create a subset of papers published in Croatian journals (1, 588) as opposed to foreign ones. All were screened for full-text OA status, journal JCR quartile ranking, journal dominant discipline, and language of publication. OA papers prevailed with 74.4%. Most were available at publisher websites. The percentage of OA papers in Croatian journals was 99.8%. The share of OA papers was the highest in the humanities and social sciences, which also saw the highest share of papers in the Croatian language.