The National Open Access Monitor Project has released the results of its first stakeholder survey, "Defining Requirements," aimed at collecting stakeholder input on the tender requirements for the National Open Access Monitor. The survey aimed to arrive at a community-agreed definition of open access at the national level and to validate and, if necessary, expand on the user stories and functional requirements of the National Open Access Monitor.
The survey's proposed scopes for the National Open Access Monitor were passed with over 90% agreement. Almost all respondents agreed that the National Open Access Monitor should use the BOAI definition of "open access," which refers to free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles without any financial, legal, or technical barriers. Similarly, 94% agreed to use the Unpaywall definition of "open access types" for this purpose.
The survey participants also agreed that the National Open Access Monitor should initially prioritize peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings in the tender requirements, with the potential to expand to monitor monographs, book chapters, other scholarly publication outputs, open research activities, and measures in the future. Furthermore, the survey respondents agreed that the National Open Access Monitor should focus on publications that can be uniquely and unambiguously identified by a DOI and define an "Irish scholarly publication" as one containing the unique persistent identifier of an Irish organization in the publication and/or the publication metadata and/or the persistent identifier metadata.
Most of the success criteria, user personas, and user stories were validated, with only minor changes. The additional current and future functional monitoring/reporting requirements supplied by participants in the survey have been included as an appendix to the tender documents.
The National Open Access Monitor Project has also published tender documents combining the survey results with relevant requirements and specifications from various sources. The documents were reviewed and approved by the National Open Access Monitor Advisory Group and published on April 6, 2023.
A public webinar on the survey results will be hosted on May 3, 2023, at 3 pm to provide an overview of the project and the survey, review the results in detail, and advise on the next steps for stakeholders. Registration for the webinar is available via Zoom.
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