Open Access: What is Open Access (OA)?

Discover the benefits of increasing the visibility and impact of your research outputs.

What is Open Access?

Open Access (OA) means that electronic scholarly research outputs are made freely available on the web to all, with no or limited license restrictions. In doing so you maximise the impact of your work as the potential readership is far greater than that for publications where the full-text is restricted to subscribers only.

Open access publications go through the same peer review process as non-open access publications. Open access does not interfere with a decision to exploit results commercially, e.g. through patenting.

National Principles for Open Access Policy Statement, Ireland (2012)

The principles driving the Open Access Policy statement are that the outputs from publicly-funded research should be publicly available to researchers and to potential users in education, business, charitable and public sectors, and to the general public.

NORF (National Open Research Forum, Ireland) National Framework on the Transition to an Open Research Environment
The NORF National Framework combines the activities of working groups over the past two years and articulates a coordinated Irish agenda for an open research environment (launched July 2019)

The Benefits at a Glance

What is Open Access? Video

Samenwerkingsverband Hogeschoolbibliotheken (SHB) - CC BY SA

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