Open Scholarship

Welcome to Trinity College Dublin's Open Scholarship Webpages. Here you will find information regarding the latest developments in Open Scholarship within Trinity, nationally and internationally. This includes information regarding Open Access, Open Data, Citizen Science and details about future and past 'Unboxing Open Scholarship' events.

This year is a year of learning in Trinity as we figure out where we are positioned within the context of the Open Scholarship spectrum. We are using this year to decide what areas we as a community want to lead in and determine the level of appetite for significant changes towards embedding Open Scholarship in everyday research life.

Nobody has all the answers to Open Scholarship. There are lots of things that are and will need to change in the future - the key to successfully embracing Open Scholarship is cultural change. We've established an ad hoc Taskforce in College to look at areas of interdependency: Open Scholarship is not simply about Open Access to publications. It covers areas relating to the assessment of research quality, researchers' careers, higher education funding, collegial practices, as well as deep underlining philosophical beliefs. 

We hope you find our Open Scholarship webpages useful and we welcome your engagement. Please don't hesitate to get in touch by emailing OpenScholarship@tcd.ie with any queries or suggestions you may have.

TCD became one of Ireland’s first Higher Education Institutions to introduce an Open Access Policy in 2012. TARA (Trinity’s Access to Research Archive), contains in excess of 33,000 open access publications, freely available to the public. In November 2018, the Dean of Research and the College Librarian & Archivist established an ad hoc Open Scholarship (OS) taskforce to explore emerging trends in OS within Ireland and internationally and to provide feedback to a growing number of consultation calls from relevant bodies  

• May 2018: LERU (League of European Research Universities) publishes a pragmatic ‘Roadmap to Open Science’   
• September 2018: Plan S is announced by a coalition of major research funders and aims at ‘accelerating the transition to full and immediate Open Access of Scientific Publications’. 
• NORF (National Open Research Forum) led by the Higher Education Authority and the Health Research Board works towards a national approach to foster open scholarship.  

June 2019: anticipated date by which NORF will have reached agreement with research funding agencies on a framework to support OS practice. This is important as Ireland seeks to align its existing Open Access policy with the current European Commissions’ Open Science policy. 

Joint chairs

• Prof. Linda Doyle, Dean of Research and LERU Research Group
• Helen Shenton, Librarian & College Archivist and LERU INFO Group

Project lead

• Prof. Lorraine Leeson – Associate Dean of Research and LERU Research Integrity Group

Secretariat

• Dr. Ruth Doherty, Office of the Dean of Research

Membership

• Prof. Neville Cox, Dean of Graduate Studies and LERU Doctoral Studies Group
• Prof. Orla Shiels, Dean of Health Sciences and LERU BIOM - Biomedicine/Life Sciences
• Antoinette Quinn, Director of Human Resources (or nominee)
• Dr. Geoff Bradley, Head of Academic Services, Innovations and Digital Platforms
• Dr. Catherine Conlon, School of Social Work & Social Policy
• Prof. Dmitri Zaitsev, School of Mathematics
• Prof. Joeran Beel, School of Computer Science & Statistics
• Prof. Immo Warntjes, School of Histories & Humanities
• Dr. Jennifer Edmond, Research Fellow & Director of Strategic Projects, AHSS
• Niamh Brennan, Programme Manager for Research Informatics
• Shane Collins, Researcher, CONNECT
• Siobhan Dunne, Sub-librarian, Teaching & Research Support & User Experience
• Arlene Healy, Sub-librarian of the Digital Systems and Services

• Dr. Christoph Schmidt-Supprian, Sub-Librarian, Collection Management
• Dr. Fiona Killard, Head of Strategic Research Development, Office of the Dean of Research
• Dr. Bevin McGeever, Research Projects Officer, Research Development Office
• Dr. Gillian Marmelstein, Research Projects Officer, Research Development Office

To date, the Task Force has provided feedback to the following consultation requests: 

• NORF Draft National Statement on the Transition to an Open Research Environment
• LERU Submission on the ‘Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S’ 
• LERU Open Science Roadmap Survey