IUA is one of 20 organisations that have backed the National Principles on Open Access Policy Statement launched on Oct 23rd 2012 at the Digital Repository of Ireland Conference in Croke Park by Sean Sherlock, Minister of State, Department of Enterprise, Jobs & Innovation and Department of Education & Skills with responsibility for Research & Innovation.
The principles driving the Open Access Policy statement are that the outputs from publicly-funded research should be publicly available to researchers and to potential users in education, business, charitable and public sectors, and to the general public.
As one of its Strategic Innovation Fund projects the IUA was involved in the development of www.RIAN.ie – Ireland’s first open access to research portal.
Definition of Open Access
“…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”.