About

Welcome to Open Research Monitor Ireland, a dynamic and innovative platform designed to chart and foster the transition of Ireland's scholarly output to 100% Open Access. This project is being delivered by OpenAIRE, following a contract awarded through a competitive tendering process by the Irish Research eLibrary (IReL) in collaboration with Education Procurement Services.

Take a look

At the heart of this platform is the mission to provide transparent, comprehensive insights into the state of Open Access in Ireland. It serves as a key instrument for analyzing trends, identifying challenges, and guiding policy development towards achieving an open, accessible, and sustainable research environment.

Our definition of Open Access

“By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

Definition of Open Access as proposed by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).

Context

In 2022, the National Open Research Forum (NORF) awarded funding to six collaborative projects to implement priority actions in Ireland's National Action Plan for Open Research 2022-2030. By building national capacity and infrastructure for open research, these projects support the visibility and impact of Irish research and help progress Ireland's strategic goals for research and innovation under Impact 2030. Development of the National Open Access Monitor is one of the priority actions and the funding for management of the project was awarded to IReL. The tender requirements for the National Open Access Monitor and a definition for open access in this context were both defined following consultation with national stakeholders. The impact of the project will be to enable both point-in-time and longitudinal monitoring of the open access status of Irish research publications as part of national implementation and monitoring of open research practices.

NORF

Ireland's National Open Research Forum (NORF) was established in 2017 to drive the Irish agenda for open research. NORF provides a space for communication, consultation and cooperation among key stakeholders in the research system regarding strategic issues and overarching policies and procedures in open research. NORF developed Ireland's National Framework on the Transition to an Open Research Environment (2019) and the National Action Plan for Open Research 2022-2030.

NORF

IReL

The Irish Research eLibrary (IReL) is a consortium of Irish research libraries. Established in 2004, it provides participating member institutions with access to a wide range of licensed e-resources, open access publishing agreements with over twenty publishers, and open research infrastructure. Hosted by Maynooth University, IReL supports a growing network of institutions and plays a key role in advancing open research in Ireland. IReL has endorsed the NORF Action Plan, in particular its goal towards achieving 100% open access to research publications in Ireland by 2030. IReL is also the lead for the Irish ORCID and Datacite consortia.

IReL

OpenAIRE

OpenAIRE AMKE is a non-profit organization established in 2018 to create a European-wide national policy and open scholarly communication infrastructure. OpenAIRE started as a series of European Commission projects in 2010 before incorporating and has built extensive experience in both technical infrastructure and working within the Open Science community. Its mission is to establish, maintain, and operate an open and sustainable scholarly communication infrastructure and provide the necessary services, resources, and network for supporting a common European open e-research and e-science environment. OpenAIRE modus operandi includes applying and contributing to international best practices to meet the needs of the research community and promote Open Science. In particular, OpenAIRE:

Adheres to and promotes key standards like the FAIR principles.
Provides the OpenAIRE Guidelines for literature repositories, data archives, and Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) managers, which (a) adapt global standards and schemas from RDA, COUNTER, COAR, DataCite, etc., and (b) are adopted by organisations around the world.
As a key partner in delivering the EOSC CORE and the EOSC Interoperability Framework, OpenAIRE ensures interoperability with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
Supports Open Access policies and advocacy.
Provides capacity building and training for the Open Science community.

As Ireland moves towards an open research environment, this platform signifies a commitment to transparency, access, and the advancement of scientific communication. It is a crucial step in supporting Ireland's alignment with broader European and global movements towards accessible and open scientific research.

Discover more about this initiative in our Zenodo community, including related reports, presentations, and datasets.

Thank you for joining us!

OpenAIRE

Infrastructure roadmap

A planned, evolving national resource

Building research monitoring infrastructure for the long term.

Phase 1 — complete

National Open Access Monitor

Launched March 2023. Ireland's first national OA monitoring platform.

5 dashboard types, fully public
Publications and OA status
Plan S and funder compliance
FAIR and APC indicators

Phase 2 — now live

National Open Research Monitor

Expanding scope to a wider range of open research outputs and open research indicators.

Datasets and software outputs
Broader open research indicators
Expanded participation pathways

Data Quality

Built with the community, not just for it

Three layers of data quality sit behind everything you see, and there are multiple ways your organisation can actively improve its own coverage and get better intelligence back.

OpenAIRE Graph

The platform is powered by Europe's largest open research graph, the same infrastructure behind EU-level open science monitoring. It provides international scale, institutional coverage and validated metadata as the foundation.

Active curation

Institutions, funders and repositories actively curate their own data in the monitor. The IReL team at Maynooth University supports this process and adds an Irish-specific layer, including custom text mining for funder-publication links and name disambiguation via OpenOrgs.

Community tools

Institutions can link outputs, upload DOIs, add records to ORCID and flag gaps directly in the platform, so the monitor improves alongside the community it serves.

Any user

Link and enrich outputs

Link outputs to projects, add to ORCID and upload DOIs directly through the platform.

Institutions

Deduplicate via OpenOrgs

Disambiguate your organisation name in the underlying graph for better output attribution.

Repositories

Funders

Enable text mining

Work with IReL to improve project-publication linking for your funded research.