Open Access and Ireland

It's Open Access week, so let's see how Ireland (ROI) is shaping up.

The good news first. The Government has just this week announced a national OA mandate, presumably following on the recent happenings in the UK. Indeed, most of the national funding agencies have had their own OA mandates for several years, but this formalises this policy at a national level.

So let's check out the OA output of the various universities and see whether taxpayers are getting their money's worth. Each university has its own institutional repository, and these are collected in a national repository, Rian. I generated the following bar charts using the statistics on deposited journal articles in Rian, combined with academic staff numbers taken from the Wikipedia pages for each university.

Are academics in TCD really 9.5 times more productive than their peers in UCC? Possibly not. I think it likely that OA deposition rates across most Irish universities could do with improvement.