Ireland's National Portal for Open Access to Research Goes Live

Shortened version of an annoucement received on June 9, 2010 from Paul Sheehan, Director of Library Services, Dublin City University

RIAN - www.rian.ie - will act as a single point of access to national research output, and contains content harvested from the institutional repositories of the seven Irish Universities and Dublin Institute of Technology. RIAN will significantly increase the visibility and impact of Irish research and will expand to harvest content from other Irish Open Access providers as the service develops.

A national network of institutional repositories will increase the exposure of national research output, and allows services, such as enhanced searching, and statistics generation, to be developed using economies of scale. RIAN will demonstrate the impact of research to potential funders, who recognise the value of wider research dissemination.

The Irish Government has identified growth in research as critical to its future as a knowledge economy. Raising the research profile is a key strategy in the Universities’ strategic plans, and the ability to showcase research output and identify institutional research strengths is extremely important in attracting new funding and high quality staff.

The development of RIAN was managed by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group and is supported by the Association. This three year project was equally funded by the Universities and the Irish Government’s Strategic Innovation Fund which is administered by the Higher Education Authority.

Benefits of RIAN to Irish authors:
* Broadens worldwide access to material
* Increases citations for research material
* Makes easier access to material via search engines such as Google, Google Scholar and Yahoo
* Raises profile of Irish researchers internationally

Benefits to Irish institutions include:
* Provides a showcase of the institution’s research output
* Raises the profile of the institution’s research internationally through broader access and citations
* Increases potential for collaboration and synthesis between Irish and international researchers

For more information contact:
Paul Sheehan, Director of Library Services, Dublin City University
Telephone: (+353 1) 7005211, Email: paul.sheehan@dcu.ie