Survey Outcome

The results of the first stakeholder survey of the National Open Access Monitor Project “Defining Requirements” have been published: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7822366. The purpose of the survey was to capture stakeholder input on the tender requirements for the National Open Access Monitor. The survey was designed to:

Arrive at a community-agreed definition for open access in this context at the national level, and
Validate, and if required expand on, the user stories and functional requirements of the National Open Access Monitor as identified by the NORF OA Monitoring Policy Brief Group.

All of the proposed scopes for the National Open Access Monitor were passed with over 90% agreement:

97% agreed with the use of the BOAI definition of “open access” for this purpose:

“By “open access” to this literature, we mean its 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.”

94% agreed with the use of the Unpaywall definition of “open access types” for this purpose
97% agreed that peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings are initially prioritised in the tender requirements for the National Open Access Monitor; with the proviso that the Monitor must have the potential in the future to expand to monitor monographs, book chapters, other scholarly publication outputs, open research activities and measures (to be defined during Action 6.2.3, expected in 2025-2027).
94% agreed that the National Open Access Monitor focus on publications which can be uniquely and unambiguously identified by a DOI
91% agreed that the National Open Access Monitor defines an “Irish scholarly publication” as a publication which contains the unique persistent identifier of an Irish organisation in the publication and/or the publication metadata and/or the persistent identifier metadata.

The majority of the success criteria, user personas and user stories were validated, with only minor changes. The additional current and future functional monitoring/reporting requirements supplied by participants of the survey have been included as an appendix to the tender documents.

For more detail on this, please see the National Open Access Monitor Survey: Defining Requirements: Outcome Report here https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7822366. The underlying survey response data is available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7821825

Webinar

All are welcome to attend the public webinar on the survey results, which will be hosted on 3^rd May at 3pm. The webinar will:

provide an overview of the project and the survey,
review the results of the survey in detail, and
advise on next steps for stakeholders.

Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_vnI7UMkrQl-o8sip48GgJw

Tender Documents

For the tender documents, the survey results were combined with the relevant requirements and specifications as detailed in:

the National Open Access Monitor Project Plan
the NORF 2022 Open Research Fund Expression of Interest document
the NORF 2022 Open Research Fund proposal application form
the peer-reviewer comments from the NORF 2022 Open Research Fund application process
the NORF National Action Plan for Open Research 2022-2030
the NORF National Open Research Landscape Report
the NORF Open Access Monitoring Policy Brief
the National Framework on the Transition to an Open Research Environment
Science Europe’s Open Access Monitoring Guidelines and Recommendations for Research Organisations and Funders
EOSC Opinion Paper on Monitoring Open Science
the European Research Area Policy Agenda
UNESCO Recommendations on Open Science
the project reports from meetings with the French and Danish national open access monitoring providers

The tender documents were reviewed and approved by the National Open Access Monitor Advisory Group on 29^th March 2023, and were published on 6^th April 2023: