IReL is pleased to announce that it is continuing support for open research infrastructure. We have renewed membership agreements with Jisc, the OAPEN Foundation and DOAJ to support vital resources for open scholarship.
The three year agreements (2025-2027) are aligned with the National Action Plan for Open Research 2022-2030, which calls for “support [for] the open infrastructure for scholarly communication that underpins bibliodiversity in the international context”.
Monica Crump, the Deputy Chair of IReL’s Advisory Committee and University Librarian at University of Galway wrote: “I am delighted that in parallel with its work enabling OA publishing and managing national open research infrastructure, IReL is committed to supporting resources which enable open scholarship across borders. Open research practices should benefit all, and by supporting open infrastructure that provide alternatives to traditional commercial publishing, IReL helps to reduce financial barriers to participation in open research.”
The open infrastructures we support with these agreements are:
- The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an essential service in integrating OA journals with all the major discovery tools and aggregation services. The mission of DOAJ is to “increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals”.
- The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), is a trusted online resource for finding OA book publishers and for the discovery of OA books. DOAB is openly and freely available to all stakeholders, and widely used by publishers, research libraries, and their suppliers. It is a central discovery service integrating OA books into the wider ecosystem of academic book publishing and distribution. DOAB is a service of DOAB Foundation, a non-profit legal entity established by OAPEN Foundation and OpenEdition.
- The OAPEN Library, managed by the OAPEN Foundation, is an online library of freely accessible academic books. OAPEN works with publishers and research funders to build a quality-controlled collection of OA books while providing premium services to different stakeholders. OAPEN is also responsible for the free-to-access OAPEN OA Books Toolkit which helps book authors to better understand OA book publishing.
- Jisc’s open policy finder (previously Sherpa Romeo) aggregates publisher OA policies from around the world and provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies on a journal-by-journal basis. Across the academic library sector it is the only trusted, central source of such information, and is an essential tool for IReL members’ institutional repositories of open access works.