CONUL, the Consortium of National and University Libraries, is at the heart of Ireland’s global advance in fostering and enabling new research, excellence in scholarship and teaching, digital depth and cultural breadth. Irish research libraries preserve Ireland’s memory and advance Irish discovery.
The focus of this guide is Open Research. Research outputs such as journal articles and book chapters are often locked behind expensive paywalls. Research data, methods, or procedures may not be accessible to others at all. Open Research aims to make scholarly outputs openly available, accessible, and reusable for everyone, and to promote collaboration for the benefit of research and society. Openness guarantees better documented and more substantiated research. Open Research is also endorsed and promoted by Irish research funders and is embedded in many institutional policies. The National Open Research Forum has produced a National Action Plan for Open Research which aims to establish a culture of Open Research and envisages 100% open access to research publications in Ireland by 2030.
Welcome to Navigating Open Research – A Guide for Early Career Researchers. This guide is designed to help you at each stage of your research journey. From preparing your research project and discovering relevant resources
(Section 1) to research data management and reproducibility
(Section 2), writing and publishing
(Section 3), sharing and publishing data
(Section 4), licensing your work
(Section 5) and communicating your research
(Section 6) every chapter provides you with practical tips that can be implemented immediately.
As you begin your research, use this guide to start a conversation about Open Research with your supervisor, colleagues and peers. Remember that Open Research is a journey, and you are not alone. There are fellow researchers, colleagues and support staff at your institutional library who will help you out along the way.
Research always starts with evaluating what others have done before. You can use your institution’s library to consult resources such as journals, databases and books. Institutional repositories contain the open access research outputs of individual institutions. You can find a list of Irish institutional repositories here. You can find Open Access literature and data via freely accessible search engines, such as Lens.org or OpenAlex. CORE, is a search engine which specialises in Open Access academic publications (books, articles, theses, etc.). You can check platforms for papers in progress, known as preprints. To learn more about preprints,