Open Access Research Publishing: Useful Open Access Resources

PubMed Central is an Open Access database of journal articles drawn primarily from the health sciences. As you can tell from the name it's part of the PubMed database produced by the National Library of Medicine in the U.S. 

The JISC Open Policy Finder (formerly  SHERPA / RoMEO), from the University of Nottingham, is a database of academic and scientific journal publishers' policies regarding copyright and Open Access.

The policy finder divides policies into green, yellow or red to indicate the publisher's copyright policies, and its position on Open Access publishing. It's an invaluable tool for researchers who would like to publish in an Open Access journal but don't know which journals will permit this.

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that provides free copyright licenses to anyone who would like to share their work freely with others.

CC (as it's often known) allows you to decide the precise extent to which you would like to share your work, but always ensures that you are credited as its author. You can decide whether to allow your work to be redistributed, re-used, adapted for different purposes - all without surrendering your intellectual property rights.

People use “ORCID” or “ORCID iD” interchangeably, but what they’re talking about is a 16-digit number and the associated record (sometimes called a profile) that stores automatic links to all your research, and links all your research with you.

By allowing trusted organizations such as universities to add your research information to your ORCID record, you can spend more time conducting your research and less time managing it. You control the information, and you decide the level of openness or privacy it should have.

Benefits of ORCID:

Name disambiguation: ORCID allows you to specify a standard, authoritative version of your name that will reconcile different versions which may have appeared over time, e.g. Sinead Murphy, S. Murphy, Sinead Anne Murphy, S. A. Murphy, Sinead A. Murphy and so on. It also ensures that you will not be confused with similarly-named researchers, since every ORCID is unique.

Professional portfolio: ORCID can store a wide range of information about your professional activities: research authorship is the most obvious, but you can also store information on grants or funding received; invited positions; distinctions, awards and honours; peer review work you may have carried out, and much more.

Labour saving: Adding this information to your ORCID – or allowing a trusted organisation to do it for you – can save a great deal of time and effort when you interact with journal publishers, HR departments or university research systems.

Research impact measurement: Your organisation can use your ORCID record to measure the impact of the research you carry out, enabling its resources to be focused more accurately and productively.

If you do not already have an ORCID, you can get one here (it’s free).

OpenAIRE is a Non-Profit Partnership of 50 organisations, established in 2018 as a legal entity, OpenAIRE A.M.K.E, to ensure a permanent open scholarly communication infrastructure to support European research.

Among the key elements of the OpenAIRE infrastructure are:

Zenodo - the EU Open Research Repository, where you can submit your research outputs

Argos - a platform for creating Data Management Plans, an essential component in any research project

Amnesia - a flexible data anonymization tool that allows user to remove identifying information from data. Amnesia transforms relational and transactional data to anonymized datasets where formal privacy guaranties hold. It also transforms secondary identifiers like birth date and zip code so that individuals cannot be identified in the data by linking them to other sources of information.

OASPA is a group representing Open Access publishers. It promotes education about OA, sets standards for ethics and best practice and advocates for gold OA in publishing. Given the widespread problem of predatory Open Access publishers, OASPA is a useful resource for researchers trying to gauge the quality of a journal.

Data Portals   DataPortals.org is the most comprehensive list of open data portals in the world. It is curated by a group of leading open data experts from around the world - including representatives from local, regional and national governments, international organisations such as the World Bank, and numerous NGOs.

Data.gov  Promoting innovation and transparency through the publication of Irish Public Sector data in open, free and reusable formats

The Directory of Open Access Journals is an online directory that indexes and provides access to quality open access, peer-reviewed journals.

Article Processing Charges (APCs) are frequently used as a funding mechanism in Open Access publishing. APCs are paid by authors in order to publish their work in Open Access journals.

APCs vary widely, from a few hundred euro to a few thousand. Such high fees are beyond the means of many, though researchers affiliated to a third-level institution may be able to secure funding from their departments. However, those unaffiliated are likely to find themselves excluded. Open Access publishing has many benefits both scientific and societal, but APCs as they presently exist are undoubtedly inequitable.

The HSE does not pay APCs on behalf of researchers. It does advocate the use of ‘green’ Open Access publishing wherever possible. Researchers looking for a reputable Open Access journal which does not charge APCs should consult the Directory of Open Access Journals.