On occasion you may have found yourself in the situation hereby your institutions holdings do not include a certain publication and have been faced with the choice of paying for access or contacting the library ILL (Inter Library Loan) service. This is true for fellow researchers all over the world, indeed the situation could be a lot worse for others without the resources of IReL.
If peers cannot access the full text of your work, they cannot read it, and therefore cannot cite it. Removing the paywall from your research ensures it is available to the widest available audience. 
The OpCit project aims to measure the open access citation advantage by collating the results of studies into this potential advantage. As of 2015 70 such studies have been conducted by researchers all over the world and collated by OpCit. The results are summarised below (Click on Image to enlarge)...
As can be seen in the majority of studies there is a clear advantage in terms of citations per paper for open access publications.
In January 2020 a small study was conducted on the DCU publication set in Scopus/SciVal to see if a quantitative, objective indicator could be found to suggest a citation advantage for OA publications. The results show that the open publication set received 190% the citation rate of the closed (paywalled) publication set. Read more here.
All major Irish and European funders require you make all (fully or partly funded) outputs available in either open access journals (Gold open access) or open access repositories (Green open access). Whilst pursuing the gold route can incur significant charges on the part of the author, depositig in your institutional repository (Doras) is available to you at no charge.
The list of major Irish funder's OA requirements are listed here...
And some major European funders…
