Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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1272. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the percentage of publicly funded research being produced which is open access; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [18375/21]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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Ireland is committed to the principle of Open Access to publicly funded research. Open Access enables the free flow of information across national and international research communities, supports research-enabled teaching and learning, citizen science and open innovation, and fosters greater transparency, accountability, and public awareness of research results. As stated in the 2019 National Framework on the Transition to an Open Research Environment, Ireland’s objective is for all Irish scholarly publications resulting from publicly funded research to be made openly available by default. This objective is in line with European Commission targets and internationally accepted best practice and will be further defined through a National Action Plan for Open Research, currently under development by Ireland’s National Open Research Forum (NORF).

The National Action Plan is expected to consider targeted support needed to bolster Open Access to research publications across Irish research institutions and diverse disciplines as well as a mechanism to track and monitor, at a national level, the percentage of publicly funded research made Open Access. Such a mechanism will allow us, not only to track the growth of Open Access, but to set targets, make interventions to address gaps that emerge, and provide transparency in terms of the accessibility of publicly funded research.

There is currently no central database at a national level to measure open access levels in publicly-funded research in Ireland. However, some research funding organisations track open access levels, including Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) which is under the auspices of my Department. In 2019, 50% of SFI-funded original and review articles published were openly available, which represented a 5% point improvement on the previous year. This percentage reflects the estimate by two publishing companies that between 43% and 51% of peer-reviewed journal articles published by authors with an affiliated address in Ireland in 2019 were open access.

SFI is committed to ensuring that all outputs arising from SFI-funded research are openly available. To this end, SFI is a signatory of Plan S and cOAlition S member, an initiative to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality. SFI’s Open Access policy reflects the principles espoused by Plan S and those of the National Framework on the Transition to an Open Research Environment. SFI is also a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration of Research Assessment (DORA) which is often seen as a complementary initiative to Open Research.