HRB 2025 Open Research Publishing

The Health Research Board (hereinafter referred to as the “HRB”) is a statutory agency under the aegis of the Department of Health. The HRB’s mission is to support research that improves people's health, promotes evidence-informed care, and creates solutions to societal challenges. Our vison is ‘better health through excellent research, data and evidence.’ An overview of the HRB’s objectives and activities may be found in The HRB Strategy 2021-2025, Health research - making an impact, (https://www.hrb.ie/strategy-2025/). The HRB oversees an approximate €50 million investment in health research activity each year. There is a fundamental shift across Europe towards making the research process more transparent, collaborative, and efficient. This is reflected in the move to ‘open research/ open science’ promoted by the European Commission and other leading stakeholders. The way research is conducted is transitioning from publication of research results in scientific journals towards sharing and using all available knowledge at an earlier stage in the research process. The HRB aims to deliver optimal value and impact from its publicly funded research and proactively engages and supports its funded research community to work in a more open manner. The HRB is committed to full, immediate, and transparent Open Access (OA) to research outputs, aligned to best international standards. The HRB has mandated OA in its publicly funded peer-reviewed research awards since 2014, and since January 2025 moved to implement ‘full and immediate OA, compliant with the PlanS principles. The HRB now invites tenderers to submit a tender proposal to provide a service to maintain and develop the HRB Open Research open publishing platform for a further Phase 3 period beginning June 2025 and running for 2 years in the first instance with an option to extend by a further 12 months each year thereafter up to an upper term of 48 months. with a built-in review The successful tenderer will be required to: · Provide the underpinning publishing technology for HRB Open Research (2025-2029), customised to support the HRB branding requirements, and run the associated editorial and production processes to enable publication on the platform. The full publication process from submission to publication should comprise immediate publication, open peer-review, and post publication curation and preservation. This service should support researchers to openly publish all of their research outputs including articles, datasets, case reports, protocols, and null and negative results. · Provide an efficient, centralised financial system for the payment of APCs that involves directly invoicing the HRB. · Work jointly with the HRB on communications, on monitoring and evaluation aspects and on establishing HRB Open Research (2025-2029) as a service used by the full range of HRB researchers and as a key infrastructure within the wider Irish research system.