Open Access

I attended an interesting meeting here in the Dublin City University library this afternoon, about 'Open Access' to Irish (and worldwide) university research, including the DCU Online Research Access Service (DORAS). The chief Librarian, Mr Paul Sheehan, and Communications lecturer Brian Trench, both gave us a detailed talk on the nature and benefits of Open Access.

As a result, I spent a couple of hours this afternoon looking over a number of articles i'd written over the last couple of years, some published, others unpublished working papers, others submitted for decision on publication. I e-mailed some of these articles for possible inclusion in the DORAS respository, which is DCU's open access repository.

The advantages to us researchers of Open Access are several, e.g. depositing our papers, published elsewhere or otherwise, in our university's repository or in eventual cross-university repositories, increases the visibility and accessibility of our research. Papers stored in these repositories are indexed by search engines, and Open Access showcases our own individual research output and that of entire schools and centres within a college/university. Open Access gives us, as researchers, easier, quicker, direct, free access to research worldwide in our field. It conversely makes our own research more visible and accessible worldwide.

So I would encourage scholars reading this blog to check out these Open Access portals online, for different institutions worldwide, as it may open the floodgates to a wealth of new and relevant research material in your area. You should also seriously consider submitting your work to your college's repository, if it has one. It could be a useful scholarly networking mechanism.

Check out the DCU Open Access repository at http://www.doras.dcu.ie/.

For details of a project aimed at setting up a combined open access portal for all Irish universities, see http://www.irel-open.ie/ .

The librarians involved can advise on copyright issues in the case of each article submitted. Also, of course, entire theses form a big part of the Open Access portals.

Question: is there a danger of repositories being used to 'dump' anything and everything, of variable quality? What sort of vetting mechanisms should or are in place to decide on what gets into DORAS and other such portals?

At present, DCU is encouraging its researchers to submit their work, e.g. articles, to DORAS. Overall, I do think it's a positive initiative.

Finally, here in DCU, DORAS currently accepts, from its researchers, a wide variety of types of research output, viz. journal articles, books, book chapters, working papers, research theses, conference papers, posters and presentations. So I emailed them a poster and a PowerPoint slideshow as well as a few articles, all on my PhD research. Hopefully, they may be included in DORAS in the near future.