Open Access Week 2019 - Week in Review

This year’s OA Week at RCSI saw two external speakers from Health Research Board join us.

Aileen Sheehy, the Data Policy Programme Officer, described HRB Open Research, the F1000 hosted publishing platform available for the outputs of any projects with HRB funded participants. These could be supporting papers such as a study protocol or research notes, not necessarily the main academic publication from a project, though these are welcome too. The platform provides a fast publication method with preprints published within 2 or 3 weeks of submission and peer review then conducted openly. There is no editorial interference in content, with checks just made for plagiarism and readability.   

Aileen also spoke about Open Access more generally, mentioning HRB’s signing of DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and their new Data Sharing policy coming in from January 2020. HRB are working with other Irish funders and with the national NORF group (National Open Research Forum) to ensure requirements are aligned.

On Wednesday Annalisa Montesanti, Programme Manager – Health Research Careers, spoke about HRB’s work to develop a pilot programme for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) research data. HRB see research data as an important and expensive output of scholarly research. All HRB-funded projects will be expected to complete and maintain Data Management Plans in future and by sharing the metadata and where possible the data itself they hope to enhance the value and benefits from research.

Andrew Simpson, Associate Librarian (Education, Research & Clinical Support) also presented brief updates on latest developments in RCSI and beyond, including RCSI’s own policies in these areas and the new RCSI Repository currently being developed.

All presentations along with RCSI’s own policies on Open Access and Research Data Management are available on the Open Science page of the Research and Innovation section of the staff portal [internal link].

Interested in finding out more about Open Access, Research Data Management and supports offered to researchers at RCSI Library? Check out our Research Support LibGuide.