UL Backs Open Access!

A new project is being trialled at the University of Limerick (UL) as part of a joint response to support Open Access (OA) publishing by all seven Universities in the Republic of Ireland.

The new approach allows for online publishing in websites called Institutional Repositories (IRs) and became operational at UL comparatively recently.

The Irish Universities project was launched in 2006 when the very first submissions were made to the Irish University repositories. The official launch took place two years later on May 16, 2008. IRs are populated by academic research ranging from special collections like the ‘Limerick Chronicle’ to postgraduate theses for research masters degrees and Ph. Ds. Students are, however, allowed to embargo the uploading of their work. This allows them a valuable breathing space to publicise and write articles based on their own copyright.

In 2006 the EU published an independent report showing that the price of academic journals had risen by 200-300 pc in the period 1975-1995 amounting to a staggering 11 billion dollars. Libraries, face increasingly tight budgets and are, therefore, attracted to the cost reductions offered by OA technologies. Not surprisingly Green OA is very much supported by libraries and academic institutions.

Indeed, there is now considerable momentum on the side of OA enthusiasts for change. US research has indicated that 95 pc of authors would self-archive if mandated to do so by their institutions. Nearly 100 pc of authors have done so, using the arXiv server available to physicists and computer science researchers, since the 1990s.

Legislation encouraging ‘self-archiving’ exists in 37 countries worldwide and in the USA the Obama Administration plans to advance similar laws. The world’s largest funding agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and most Universities, fully support OA.

If adopted widely the process could also generate substantial savings for those in Less Developed Countries (LDCs) who struggle with the costs involved in purchasing elite journals.

The UL initiative, taken as part of a national commitment by Irish Universities to self-archiving, represents a valuable first-step on the road to Open Access publishing.