Policies & Strategies

Open Research and in particular open access to publications and data is now mainstream and is a condition increasingly imposed by funders. This is done because it is good for the individual researchers, the research organisations, and the research funders. There are huge amounts of taxpayers’ money invested in research worldwide and the taxpayer is now looking for a return. They (and everybody else) want to see all research outputs available to all researchers to create new knowledge that is good for society in a wide variety of ways.

However, please remember there can be many legitimate reasons why data cannot be made open, but your mantra should be “as open as possible, as closed as necessary”. In other words, open should be the default position and you must provide sufficient justification for your decision to make it closed. This kind of thinking is now making its way, albeit slowly, into research strategies at a national and international level.

Many funders now support open access to publications and increasingly to data as part of their strategy. Some examples include:

International

UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science

ORSU: Open Research Support Unit

International

Europe

Ireland