Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union has mandated the education officer and welfare and equality officer to promote and campaign for the principles of open access of academic materials.
The officers, mandated to work alongside College, will ensure that the open access system – called Trinity’s Open Access Institutional Repository (TARA) – is advertised and used by researchers.
László Molnárfi, class representative for first-year PPES, proposed the motion and Bev Genockey, deputy STEM convenor, seconded it.
Speaking on the motion, Molnárfi said that academic open access is a “huge issue” and that there is a “big element of inequality” if information is behind a paywall.
STEM Convenor Daniel O’Reilly also spoke in favour of the motion, but asked for it to be amended so that it did not refer to just scientific literature and instead referred to academic literature, in order to make it “more broad”.
In the motion, council regretted that “the ongoing prevalence of paywall academia, that is pay-for-view or subscription based access to scientific literature, representing an access barrier for students and researchers alike, especially vis-a-vis socioeconomically disadvantaged persons”.
Council also noted that “as opposed to previous forms of distribution, the digitalisation of academia has meant that research can be increasingly cheaply published”.
TARA is designed so that researchers in Trinity can archive their work.
The content in TARA includes research papers, photographs, videos, theses and conference papers. The system used DSpace open source software as its searchable web interface.
Users can browse and search through TARA, which includes a search function that enables users to look for items by author and title. They can also look up key words.
All members of staff, postgraduates or members of an established community in TARA can submit content to the repository.
Evidence has shown that open access can increase citations by as much as 300 per cent. The repositories are now being used across the world by universities looking to showcase their work. There are currently over 750 repositories in existence across the world.
The library manages TARA, and the repository is governed by the Institutional Repository Steering Group and is directed by the Dean of Research.
