SCOIR: Secondary rights, Copyright, Open access, Institutional policies, and Rights retention

Governance: The team is co-lead by TCD and TU Dublin. There is a management team made up of the project leads and project manager and each work package holds regular meetings. The project has an international advisory board which meets annually.

Overview of the project: SCOIR Secondary rights, Copyright, Open access, Institutional policies, and Rights retention. Scoir is the Irish word for “unharness”; and the project aims to unharness the power of open research. The Project will assess and present options for researcher’s rights retention of their published works and making them available open access.

The project will adopt a two-pronged approach to policy and legislative change. To develop a secondary publishing right in Irish legislation and adoption of institutional rights retention polices. Such institution’s policy will allow the author’s accepted version of a research output be shared via an institutional repository. The Legislation will be drafted in support of secondary publication rights based on an analysis of international and Irish law. SCOIR will also develop an open access policy framework for both funders and institutions that is aligned with the National Action Plan for Open Research and international best practice.

The project is supported by a consortium of wide range of partners and affiliates which will ensure that the outputs are acceptable to stakeholders across the Irish higher education landscape. To ensure adoption within and beyond the project, a suite of informational materials and learning resources will be made available throughout the project to assist stakeholders communicate the benefits of a shared and aligned approach.

Ireland has a longer history with copyright than many countries: the first recorded copyright judgment was the decision of King Diarmaid in the dispute between Saint Columba and Saint Finian in 561 CE. “To every cow its calf, to every book its copy,” he ruled, affirming Finian’s copyright against Columba’s infringement. The judgment was a world first, and this project will continue Ireland’s proud tradition of copyright innovation.

Resources and outputs: All outputs will be shared on https://scoir.moodlecloud.com.