Irish clover green view on Open Access
Open Access adds value to research, to the economy and to society. “The outputs from publicly-funded research should be publicly available to researchers, but also to potential users in education, business, charitable and public sectors, and to the general public.” This is the basic contention of the Irish national Open Access strategy.
Peter Suber of the Harvard Open Access Project comments: “This is another policy to require green Open Access (a deposit in an OA repository) rather than gold Open Access (submission to an OA journal) as proposed by the UK Finch Committee.”
Integrity of the scientific work
Ireland already has considerable expertise in developing Open Access to publicly funded research, aligned with international thinking and initiatives, and is now seeking to strengthen its approach to support international developments on Open Access led by the European Commission, Science Europe and other international agencies.
In a recent government paper, the Irish define Open Access as “…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”.
