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Open Scholarship

What is SOAPBOX?

Student Open Access Project (SOAPbox)

TCD performs strongly in the area of student extra-curricular activities. In College, there are five capitated bodies and of these, four are involved either directly or indirectly in publishing the work of students. This includes Trinity Publications, TCDSU (via University Times related publications), the Graduate Students’ Union and the Central Societies Committee (via their member societies). In addition to this, there are many school and faculty associations with Journals exhibiting student’s research. It is important that we celebrate the research initiatives of our student community.

This project seeks to engage the student community in activities that will maximise the reach of their work and embrace contemporary developments in scholarly communication via the facilitation of a Student Open Access Project, or SOAPBOX for short. Students participating in this project will receive recognition for their participation on this programme materialising in the award of a 'Certificate in Scholarly Communication' from the Office of the Dean of Research.

There are many good reasons for engaging with students in Open Access Publishing including:

  • Open Access publications are known to reach a wider audience thus maximising the potential reach of student work;
  • The lifetime of a publication can vary considerably for several reasons and publication outputs can be lost over time which can be prevented via appropriate permanent object identifiers and appropriate archiving;
  • The current trajectory of scholarly communication points to embracing new technology in order to make the process of publishing more efficient;
  • The revolution begins with the early stage researchers – by working with students and their publication avenues we can provide the necessary skills for open access practices and encourage the use of FAIR data principles

The project also serves to challenge research culture in a very practical way and is symbiotic to many internal strategies including the College’s Strategic Plan, the Research Excellence Strategy and the Library’s Strategy.

SOAPbox includes training in areas pertaining to Open Access, Copyright Licensing, FAIR Data Principles, Data Management Plans, Copy-Editing and Proofreading, Research Communication Skills, Publishing Skills, Content Strategy for the Web, People Management Skills in Publishing and Project Management Skills.

In addition to this SOAPbox explores ways that authors can identify the relevance of their work to grand societal missions as well as other areas of public policy relevance and includes a tutorial on how to write an effective policy impact statement whilst engaging continously with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. 

Participating Publications:

In total we have 8 Journals/Titles involved in the SOAPbox project. These include:

SOAPBOX Resources