Finding Irish information: ISSDA & IQDA

Following on from last week's post, these two archives may be of interest.

The Irish Social Science Data Archive (ISSDA) is Ireland's leading centre for quantitative data acquisition, preservation and dissemination. Based at, and managed by, UCD Library, it is a national service that provides free access to a wide range of data in the social sciences, for research and teaching purposes. Data is acquired from academic, research bodies and public sector sources.

Key datasets in health include:

• All Ireland Traveller Health Study
• Children's Sport Participation and Physical Activity (CSPPA)
• Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC)
• National Psychological Wellbeing and Distress Study (NPWDS)

The Irish Qualitative Data Archive (IQDA) is a central access point for qualitative social science data generated in or about Ireland. Based in NUI Maynooth, it is a national programme and qualitative datasets interviews, pictures and other non-numerical material.

Data collections include:

• Growing Up in Ireland
• Life Histories and Social Change
• New Urban Living

GM
  

Finding Irish healthcare information

Directory of Irish Resources

Finding information on Irish healthcare topics can be challenging as there are a limited number of Irish published sources. Information may be widely scattered across a range of institutions, academic centres, clinical bodies, official and voluntary agencies. Formats may include reports, book chapters, official publications, EU documentation, theses and documents resident on any number of websites. No one index or search engine is likely to discover all relevant information. To search systematically, each resource / website should be interrogated using the website search box.    

RCSI Library continues to point to sources of Irish healthcare information on our webpages:  additional suggestions are welcome. 


Paul Murphy

Open Access

We have seen the success of green open access with direct author self deposit of journal papers to repositories increasing all the time. Ease of access and funder mandates have sharply increased both deposit and readership and subsequent impact. In our own document repository epublications@rcsi   900 papers and dissertations by RCSI authors have been downloaded over 293,000 times.

There is a corresponding increase in publication in gold open access journals, the access model where authors pre-pay publication fees but readers view without charge. There has been a measurable increase in citation impact from gold open access publishing. The BioMedNet Central   suite of journals is a well known example of gold publishing in medicine and over 300 papers by RCSI authors are freely available in BioMedNet BMC titles.

There are many other gold open access (OA) journals in clinical medicine, molecular biology, pharmacology and psychiatry. You can use the DOAJ directory, Directory of Open Access Journals  to find all OA journals in a category.  The growth of gold OA, plus a listing of the highest impact OA titles, is presented in a recent article, itself open access.  On the impact of Gold Open Access journals  Gumpenberger, C. et al 2013  Scientometrics  96 (1), pp. 221-238 

Connect to   epublications@rcsi   for more information about research funder mandates and green open access deposit.


Paul Murphy