"Seeing the Bigger Picture: How the Health Research Board Uses the Open Research Monitor Ireland"

The Health Research Board (HRB) is Ireland's national funder for health research, operating at the intersection of science, policy, and public benefit. For Patricia Clarke, its Programme Manager for Open Science, the question of open access has never been a simple compliance checkbox. It is a system-level challenge that requires the right data, the right comparators, and the right infrastructure to manage.

The Open Research Monitor Ireland (ORMI), developed by IReL in partnership with OpenAIRE, is one of the tools HRB has come to rely on. Patricia spoke with the OpenAIRE Monitor team about how she uses it, what it has changed, and where she sees it going.

Open access is a small part of what I do. I'm responsible for coordinating the open science agenda at HRB and for our open access policy, which we revised and brought into effect on 1 January this year. That involved a lot of work looking at how we fund open access, how we become Plan S compliant, though we haven't officially signed up to Plan S or joined the Coalition S group, how to monitor it beyond the term of a grant, and how to make it work for different groups within the organisation, from clinicians to social scientists.

We've set up an internal open science governance group that brings together people from strategy, finance, research and the library, because different parts of the organisation were engaging with open access separately. The goal is to look at it as a whole rather than in isolated parts. We've been working on open access since 2014 and we do take transparency and openness seriously. We have a data policy, ORCID integration, our own publication platform. The broader aim is making sure the research we fund is actually open, useful, and used.

We were automatically included when the Irish Monitor was set up in 2024, rather than formally signed in. That meant there were no dedicated resources assigned to it from the start, something I'd flag as a structural recommendation for future rollouts. But we treated it as a pilot and saw it filling a real gap.

On trust, because Monitor was developed as a national infrastructure through IReL and links into OpenAIRE, we approached it with a baseline level of confidence. We're familiar with OpenAIRE through our work in Horizon Europe and know it uses standardised, comprehensive data. It was set up as a policy initiative and explicitly designed to do a certain job. The things you're always cautious about are metadata quality and whether two systems end up showing different pictures. But actually, when that happened, it was useful. It helped us understand what each system does well.

"It's great that this system is national. It does a different thing than Research Fish. It's system level, it allows you to compare across people, and it looks at over time, which isn't quite so easy to get in our own system."

For me, the most valuable thing is the breakdown of open access into its different variations, gold, green, different routes, license types, rather than just a binary yes or no. The breakdown of the blunt open access into different variations, that's really useful. That level of granularity is something our internal systems don't give us easily.

One indicator I'm still working to understand better is immediacy, whether something is immediately open access at the point of publication or whether there's an embargo. With our new policy we're Plan S aligned, but tracking whether APC funding resulted in full, immediate open access is genuinely hard, partly because journal policies change over time. We've now added a dedicated budget code for APCs so we can track where the money goes, but certainty at point of publication remains a challenge. It's something I'd like to explore further with the Monitor team.

The main thing Monitor does is allow you to look across different funders and organisations and see how you compare, using the same indicators consistently. That's something you simply don't get elsewhere. It's reassuring, and it's also honest. We're not 100% yet, but we're doing okay.

I deliberately aligned HRB's policy as closely as possible to Research Ireland's, because we're both funding research in the same universities. I didn't want to bring in a new way of them reporting to us. Having a comparator across funders using the same metrics is directly useful for that kind of coordination.

It's also changed our approach to compliance monitoring. Rather than going back to individual researchers, we want to monitor at an institutional level, identifying pockets of non-compliance and engaging research offices and librarians to address things systematically. Monitor supports that kind of oversight in a way our internal systems don't.

"We want to monitor compliance on our policy at an institutional level. Rather than going back to individual researchers, open access is something that the research organisations should lead on."

Mostly screenshots, so far. I've used Monitor visuals to report back on our involvement in the pilot, showing where HRB sits nationally and what we've gained from participating. We're still quite email and briefing paper driven at HRB, though that's changing as we move towards Power BI dashboards.

During the interview, the Monitor team shared two features Patricia hadn't been aware of: an embed button on each graph that allows any indicator to be placed directly onto a website or interactive report, updating automatically when the data updates; and the ability to download the underlying data per graph as a CSV or Excel file. Both opened up new possibilities for how Monitor data could feature in HRB's internal reporting.

"Oh yeah, definitely, the embed would be useful. I must have a look at that."

For me, Monitor is, or should be, a strategic infrastructure for Ireland. It's something we don't have elsewhere, and IReL fills that gap. It's kind of missed out of the infrastructure conversation quite a bit, and hopefully that's changing.

Publications are one part of it, but the fact that it links into the broader policy discussion, and now into the NORF framework, where the question is whether Ireland is actually meeting the targets that have been set, is what makes it genuinely strategic. Just because it's called an open access publications monitor, the fact that you can benchmark on it, see where you are, look across time and other players in Ireland... it's definitely more.

The metadata and persistent identifier layer also gives Monitor potential well beyond publication records. There's a really good insight into how metadata and persistent identifiers are being used. It could be much more than just a publication record.

"It's probably like my phone. I only use 50% of it."

I'd describe it as a national infrastructure for system-level insight, useful for benchmarking and tracking over time, not just compliance. But I wouldn't just send people off to explore it on their own. Given how many systems everyone is managing at the moment, the best approach is a facilitated session, getting the Monitor team in to walk through what it shows and why it matters. I'd be happy to set that up at HRB.

On what's missing: a way to set up your own reports, pulling together the specific indicators you care about into something you can take away, would be very useful. The embed and download features help, but a more structured reporting layer with text summaries alongside graphs would make Monitor much easier to bring into briefings and presentations.

"It would be a shame to have it there and not use it."

For Patricia, the Monitor is not simply another reporting tool, but a piece of national research infrastructure whose value will continue to grow as more organisations engage with it and more capabilities are added. Recent work on project-level integration and text mining has already improved how HRB-funded outputs are linked and discovered in OpenAIRE Explore, and the kind of structured, exportable reporting layer she'd like to see next is already on the Monitor team's roadmap, part of an ongoing effort to make the platform more useful with every release.