Sectoral Initiatives under SIF
IUA LIBRARIES NATIONAL RESEARCH PORTAL
TO RAISE THE PROFILE OF IRISH RESEARCH FINDINGS
Librarians from the seven universities under the Irish Universities Association have launched an initiative to promote and preserve the research output of Irish researchers, following a successful bid to the HEA under the Government’s Strategic Innovation Fund. The IUA Libraries National Research Portal will make Irish research output freely available to the global research community by creating repositories of research papers within each University. The project will establish a national portal on the Web which will provide a single view of the country’s research publications.
Download the Open Access to Irish University Research Brochure here.
There are over 20,000 research periodicals publishing worldwide and the results of Irish research appear amongst this enormous wealth of information. The value of a research report is often measured by its 'impact factor', i.e. how often it is cited by other researchers. The National Research Portal service will significantly increase the likelihood of references to Irish research appearing in print. Robin Adams, Librarian of Trinity College Dublin and Chair of the IUA Librarians Group describes the initiative as ‘an innovative opportunity for the university libraries to work together to promote the research output of their institutions, so that the international research community can be aware of the important work undertaken by Irish scholars and scientists. It will also ensure that this work is preserved in digital format to international standards’
The National Portal will act as a single point of access to national research output and contain content harvested from individual university Research Repositories. It will include statistical data-sets associated with research. It will also facilitate a range of value-added services, which will include links to university Research Support Systems, enhanced searching through indexing of full-text content, the analyses of content and indicators of research output and the identification of research trends. The National Portal will also provide for the long-term preservation of research papers and output and for the establishment of standards of description and maintenance.
The Government has identified growth in research as critical to ensuring Ireland’s future as a key player on the world stage, and essential in underpinning Ireland’s investment in 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 investment and high quality staff. For individual researchers, studies have shown that as a result of depositing material in institutional repositories citations increase, thus further disseminating the results of research, enhancing the researcher’s reputation, supporting future student interest and collaborative partnerships.
At national level, a network of institutional repositories increases the exposure of national research output, and allows services, such as enhanced searching, and statistics generation to be developed using economies of scale. The service will demonstrate the impact of research to potential funders, who recognise the value of wider research dissemination and the associated research data that supports the reports and conclusions in published research.
The funding bid was co-ordinated by the Irish Universities Association on behalf of all seven universities and will form the basis of future proposals to develop a national university digital library infrastructure. The initiative offers the promise of scaling the Research Portal to include the output of other partners within and beyond the higher education community.
