Action 6.2.1: Develop a monitor for open access at the national level, initially through pilot reports and a national dashboard to publish, analyse and track progress towards 100% OA. As part of open access monitoring, agree a national definition of OA and analyse overall costs to the national research system. The monitoring service will be driven by community requirements and draw on open data and tools wherever possible, including institutional sources identified under Action 3.1

The Lead Institution is Maynooth University and the Project Coordinator is IReL. The IReL Executive operates as a separate Business Unit within Maynooth University. The day-to-day management of the project is driven by the IReL Open Scholarship Officer 

 NORF National OA Monitoring Project Advisory Group: 

• Purpose This group holds an advisory role for IReL and the Project Manager, complimenting the governance role of Maynooth University and the obligations set out by NORF. It provides expert guidance when required throughout the project, e.g. by contributing to tender reviews; validating the pilot results against NORF requirements; and contributing to the recommendation of which solution NORF should proceed with. 
• Membership The membership of the Advisory Group comprises of members of the NORF National Open Access Monitoring Policy Brief Group. The Advisory Group is  convened and chaired by the IReL Director.

The National Open Access Monitor project is a two-year project funded under the National Open Research Forum 2022 Open Research Fund. Led by IReL, this project will develop a monitor for Open Access (OA) at the national level to publish, analyse and track progress towards the national target of 100% OA to research publications by 2030.

To achieve this objective, it is imperative to determine the current state of OA nationally, and to monitor how this develops as Irish research continues to transition to open research. While such analysis is currently underway throughout the sector, it is resource-heavy, time-consuming and often-times dependent on proprietary data sources which leads to silos of data and analysis for single stakeholder benefit. This project aims to rectify that. First, by identifying potential vendors and working to pilot and test potential solutions for the National OA Monitor. Then, by rolling out the approved solution(s) that will be publicly accessible to view and analyse, and be built based on community requirements.

The impact of the project will be to enable both point-in-time and longitudinal monitoring of the open access status of Irish research publications as part of national implementation and monitoring of open research practices.

As Ireland moves into the next phase of the NORF National Action Plan for Open Research, it is imperative to determine the current state of open access in Ireland, and to monitor how this develops as stakeholder investments transition Irish research towards open research. While such analysis is currently underway throughout the sector, it is resource-heavy, time-consuming and often-times dependent on proprietary data sources which leads to silos of data and analysis for single stakeholder benefit. The NORF-funded National Open Access Monitor Project seeks to rectify that, initially through a pilot report and a national dashboard to publish, analyse and track progress towards 100% open access.

The key objectives and expected outcomes are to:
• Work to arrive at a community-agreed definition for “open access”, in this context, at the national level
• Build on previous NORF work, engaging with national to gather and validate user requirements for open access monitoring
• Work with an external vendor to deliver a report and a national dashboard to help Ireland publish, analyse and track open access rates at the national level.
• Document challenges that should be addressed in long-term monitoring solutions and recommend steps to be taken, including workflows for data validation and enrichment.
• Work to improve the quality and depth of data used for the national dashboard in line with international best practice through stakeholder collaboration and direct input or validation where possible. This work will include both the trouble-shooting aspects of ensuring the National Open Access Monitor (henceforth, “the Monitor”) represents stakeholder entities correctly, and working to promote best practice with open data creators and open infrastructure providers on sustainable and replicable workflows and methodologies to ensure better quality metadata at source, a process that will serve not only the Monitor but also the wider ecosystem of open data and open scholarly
infrastructure.
• Following NORF and Science Europe recommendations, ensure that the Monitor uses data and bibliographic databases that are openly accessible, is built using open infrastructure, and is publicly accessible to view and analyse. The impact of the project will be to enable both point-in-time and longitudinal monitoring of the open access status of Irish publications as part of the national implementation of open
research practices.

Significant progress has been made since the project launched in November 2022:
1. Defining the Requirements of the National Open Access Monitor:
• The Advisory Group held meetings with the Danish and French national monitoring solution providers and produced reports summarising their input and advice.
• A survey was conducted in February 2023 to capture stakeholder input on the tender requirements for the Monitor. Specifically, to define the scope of the Monitor; to arrive at a community-agreed definition for open access in this context at the national level; and to define the functional requirements of the Monitor. Stakeholders agreed that the Monitor would:
o use the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of “open access”. “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.” https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiave.org/read/
o use the Unpaywall definition of “open access types”
o initially focus on monitoring peer-reviewed articles and conference proceedings
o 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)
o focus on publications which can be uniquely and unambiguously identified by a DOI
o define 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

• For the tender documents, the survey results were combined with the advice from the French and Danish meetings and the best practice national and international specifications for such infrastructure (as detailed here: https://irel.ie/oamonitor-february2023survey-update/) and reviewed and approved by the Advisory Group.

2. Contracting a Vendor for the National Open Access Monitor:
• The RFT was published on 6th April, run by IReL with Education Procurement Services.
• The tendering and contracting process was completed on 10th July 2023 and OpenAIRE were announced as the successful vendor. The contract is for one year, from 10th July 2023 – 9th July 2024, with the potential to renew.
• OpenAIRE have since delivered an Inception Report to provide stakeholders with a clear description of what they will deliver as part of this project; the National Open Access Monitor, Draft Report to provide an initial, baseline analysis of the state of OA in Ireland;
presented three webinars (introduction, RPO training, RFO training); and presented to two Advisory Group meetings for a review of deliverables (September, October 2023)

3. Fostering a Transparent, Stakeholder-Centred Approach
• Development of the Monitor is stakeholder centred, and therefore the Maynooth University Research Ethics process was key to establishing a consent mechanism for collecting feedback, and obtaining permission to use, store and publicly archive that feedback. This was completed on 8 December 2022.
• A Zenodo community for the project was established to be a public transparent archive of all documentation on the project. To date, these documents have had 2,495 views and 1,863 downloads.
• Stakeholders were invited to participate in the project, in public calls through social media, newsletters, and targeted email campaigns from January through October 2023. To date, 180 individuals have provided consent to participate in the project.
• Public webinars were hosted to optimise engagement (defining requirements survey results, developing the National Open Access Monitor; introduction to the organisational identity survey), with the sessions recorded and shared publicly.
• In addition, one-to-one stakeholder support has been provided on request, and daily online open-drop support sessions were hosted throughout the term of both surveys in February and October, to reduce the barriers for engagement.
• A HEA-net hosted mailing list was launched in early June, to provide public ongoing updates, news and announcements on the project. To date, 193 individuals have registered to receive these emails.
• To support the development of communities of practice, dedicated HEAnet listserv discussion groups for peer-to-peer support for each stakeholder group were launched in October. To date, these groups have received 64 registrations.
• A stakeholder survey on organisational identity was run in October 2023, to identify all Irish RPOs and RFOs to be represented in the Monitor; to identify if an RPO/RFO is publicly-funded to enable reporting on this metric in the Monitor; and to capture the
persistent identifiers for RPOs, RFOs and publishers, to enable the vendor to correctly identify relevant research for the Monitor. This survey received 126 responses.
• Stakeholders were also invited to provide feedback on the OpenAIRE National Open Access Monitor, Draft Report.