"From 56% to 61.1% in 2025 and 75% until 2025: How Maynooth University Used Monitor to Drive Open Access Progress"

Maynooth University has been one of Ireland's most active open access institutions for decades. Research Services Team Manager Fran Callaghan was involved in the original NORF project that specified the Open Research Monitor Ireland, and has been working with the Monitor since its Irish launch in 2024.

The Open Research Monitor Ireland (ORM), developed by IReL in partnership with OpenAIRE, gives institutions like Maynooth the data infrastructure to track, understand, and act on their open access position. Fran spoke with the OpenAIRE Monitor team about the journey from a puzzling 56% headline figure to a data-backed 61.1%, and what that process taught him about the relationship between metadata and research visibility.

I am the Research Services Team Manager here in Maynooth University Library. Open research and open scholarship has been practised in Maynooth for many years, even decades. In the team we manage MURAL, the oldest institutional repository in Ireland, which is nearly 25 years old. We also run Maynooth Academic Publishing, which currently publishes five diamond open access titles, academic-led journals from early-career researchers and their international collaborators. And we operate the Irish Qualitative Data Archive, which holds qualitative data including interviews, oral histories, and personal archives.

We also handle local administration of our transformative agreements, available via the IReL consortium. Anything open scholarship and open science related is the focal point of our team. We are really leading the charge on Maynooth's open scholarship effort.

I was involved in the original NORF project that specified the National Open Access Monitor. NORF is the National Open Research Forum, and it announced a number of Strand 1 projects about five years ago, of which the National Open Access Monitor was one. Also out of NORF came Ireland's National Action Plan towards 100% open access by 2030.

As a result, we have engaged nationally via NORF, and particularly locally in Maynooth, to try to achieve that goal. What we were trying to do was measure our progress, and that was never possible until we had the OA Monitor. So really it comes down to gauging progress towards our 100% open access target.

Properly, about 12 months. The Monitor launched in Ireland around August or September 2024, and when we first looked, our headline figure was 56% open access. I knew immediately that didn't reflect Maynooth. We would be one of the more active, more engaged open access universities in Ireland, and 56% is roughly half. That's just not enough for what we were doing.

It took some digging to understand why. What we found was that a significant chunk of our institutional repository data was being marked as open access without licence. An item must carry a licence to be fully considered open access, and we were exposing our licence information in plain English rather than using the correct machine-readable tag. The OpenAIRE Graph simply didn't recognise what we were sending.

"The fanfare is lost. When you say, look at this wonderful monitor, it says 56%, and everyone kind of goes... no."

We worked with the Monitor team to fix the harvest, and after the June 2025 data update we finally had data we could largely rely on. What matters is that the data we were showing was not incorrect. The problem was that our metadata wasn't being fed to the Graph in a format it could read. That isn't immediately apparent though, and in that gap, confidence in the Monitor gets questioned. Any questions we raised with the support team were always answered, and that continuity of support was genuinely important during those months of uncertainty.

The one that comes to mind is citations, and specifically citations by Sustainable Development Goals. I wasn't expecting citation data to feature so prominently in the Monitor, and I hadn't been particularly interested in the SDG view initially. But as I was demonstrating Monitor during the launch, showing it to departments and academics around the university, that was the indicator that stopped people in their tracks.

What was really noteworthy was that the SDGs where Maynooth was most impactful in terms of citations were the areas the university is known for nationally, particularly climate science. That alignment was genuinely affirming. For Open Access Week 2025 we generated what we called an Open Access Report Card for the university, and the SDG citation graph was one of the elements we included alongside the headline number and the trends.

That tends to be what surprises people when they first see Monitor. The headline OA percentage is what they come for. The SDG citations are what make them stay.

There are two things I would highlight if someone asked what difference Monitor has made to Maynooth in the last 12 months. The first is the Open Access Report Card, which drew on the headline OA percentage, the SDG citations, and top authors. The second, and this sits in one of the less visible areas of Monitor, is using the closed access data to drive outreach.

We can look at what is genuinely not open access and use that to identify the authors and works we should be targeting. We verify whether something is truly absent from our repository, and then engage with those academics directly. It gives us a targeted, evidence-based conversation rather than a broad appeal.

In terms of how we use it in practice, there are almost two ends to Monitor for me. For a headline number, I go in, apply the filters, set the timeframe, and download the PNG. It goes straight into a report or presentation and it looks great. But we have also taken the underlying CSV data and used it in more analytical ways. One example: we took the DOIs from Monitor, uploaded them into SciVal, and compared the citation impact of our open access publication set against our closed set. The open set is around 50% more impactful in terms of citations. That kind of analysis starts with Monitor data.

The experience of going from 56% to 69% was the initial cleanup, but once that was done, the Monitor team prompted us to go further and to keep working towards OpenAIRE V4 compliance. Using Monitor and getting more familiar with the Graph has changed my appreciation of metadata, not just our own repository metadata but metadata in the wider sense.

"We were describing the object well, but we weren't enabling the relationship."

As a librarian, you appreciate that metadata has always been key to describing an object. But working with Monitor and the Graph illustrated how important metadata is not just for describing objects, but for enabling the relationships between them. The Monitor, and by extension the Graph, becomes a powerful, interconnected research ecosystem. And it is all underpinned by good, clean, interoperable metadata.

Our original licence problem illustrates this perfectly. We always had the metadata. A human looking at our repository could read that an item was available under a Creative Commons licence. But when we exposed that information to the OpenAIRE Graph, we were describing the object well in human terms without enabling the Graph to recognise and act on that description. The relationship was missing.

On V4 compliance, we are registered with OpenAIRE Provide, we have run the validator, and the results were largely positive. A large number of green ticks, a small number of warnings, and a very small number of errors. Our platform, ePrints, has made this transition smoother than it has been for some other institutions, particularly those on DSpace. Enabling the OpenAIRE plugin took our provider about an hour. We are working through the remaining elements now with a technical coordinator from a related national project helping to interpret the validator outputs in accessible terms. I am confident we will have that final piece done by end of August. At that point, we will close it out and say we are V4 compliant, and then turn our attention to engaging with OpenAPC to get our APC funding information into the ecosystem.

For Fran, the Monitor became the tool that let Maynooth see what its metadata was actually doing, not just what it said it was doing. At the close of the interview, the Monitor team found that a bug had been understating Maynooth's progress, and that the actual open access rate stood at around 61.1%. "61.1%is good. We're moving in the right direction. That was the whole point of the Monitor."