News

RIAN.ie - Putting Irish Research on the Map

27 October 2010

(L-R)Tom Boland CEO HEA, Paul Sheehan Director of Library Services DCU, Prof Brian Norton President DIT, Martin Curley, Director Intel Labs Europe, Tanaiste & Minister for Education and Skills Mary Coughlan, Prof Tom Collins, President NUI Maynooth, Ned Costello CEO IUA and Patrick Cunningham, Chief Scientific Advisor.

RIAN.ie - Ireland’s new Open Access research publications portal was launched on Wednesday 20 October by Tánaiste and Minister for Education and Skills Mary Coughlan T.D.

Speaking at the launch the Tánaiste said, “Growth through innovation and research is at the heart of our ‘smart economy’ strategy. Our research output is a key building block in achieving its aims. Ireland already has an above EU-15 average rate of scientific citations and publications and this is growing rapidly. RIAN.ie will help grow it faster.”

RIAN.ie is a web-based portal that will harvest and display the content of the repositories of the seven universities and the DIT. It is among the first wave of national open access portals in the world, placing Ireland at the forefront of the movement. The portal will demonstrate the impact of research to potential investors and funders, who recognise the value of wider research dissemination.

The portal went live in July and has received 540,000 visits to the site accessing the 12,343 items in RIAN from all participating institutions. Even at this early stage, Item views have grown steadily from 27,940 in July to 108,484 in September and page views have grown by 46% to 475,676.

The value of a research paper or journal article is often measured by its ‘impact factor’, i.e. how often it is cited by the worldwide community of researchers. Research into citation impact has demonstrated that authors whose papers are made Open Access are cited significantly more than authors whose articles are available only to subscribers. RIAN will significantly increase the visibility and impact of Irish research and is a resource that will grow over time as our research efforts expand.

RIAN.ie is the result of a HEA funded Strategic Innovation Fund project which began in 2007 and was completed on time and within budget this year. The project was conceived by the IUA Librarian’s Group. Paul Sheehan (Director of Library Services, DCU)  chaired the project steering group.