The Health Research Board (HRB) is to introduce a new open publishing system for work it funds.

The HRB Open Research platform will give all HRB-funded researchers a place to immediately publish any research results that they think are worth sharing.

These could include research articles, failed results, case reports, minor findings and the data that forms the basis of their results.

The HRB says the new system will tackle some of the issues faced by researchers.

These include spending time and money on research, the results of which never get shared or published because they are filed away.

This can lead to an unnecessary duplication of work and funding in the same research area.

There is also a growing problem with reproducibility of results in research, with a recent survey finding that 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce the experiments of others.

It will also enable rapid publication of results where desirable and enable the authors, not editors of journals, decide what should be published.

Currently most established high impact journals use a peer-review process, where research is submitted for consideration and then reviewed by external experts to ensure it is credible and complete before publication.

However, scientists often complain that the peer-review process is opaque, not open, and takes too long.

The new HRB system, the organisation argues, will make that process transparent as research can be peer-reviewed in the open, allowing researchers to see reviewers comments on the work.

Once a sufficient level of peer review has been reached the articles will be indexed in major bibliometric databases.

All publication charges under the new system will be covered by the HRB.

The platform will be launched in February of next year, will be the first of its kind in Ireland and will use technology developed by F1000Research.

"We want the research we fund to be open and accessible, so that results are available quickly and can have the widest possible impact," said Dr Mairead O Driscoll form the HRB.

"HRB Open Research will achieve this, which in turn will increase the speed at which research results can be applied in practice to improve people’s health, change approaches to care and inform policy."