RIAN, Ireland's new national portal for open access (OA) to Irish published research, went live on June 8, 2010. The portal (www.rian.ie) will contain content harvested from the institutional repositories of the seven Irish universities and Dublin Institute of Technology. It is designed to act as a single point of access to national research output, and will seek to significantly increase the visibility and impact of Irish research. RIAN will further expand to harvest content from other Irish OA providers as the service develops.
A national network of institutional repositories is expected to increase the exposure of national research output, and allow services, such as enhanced searching and statistics generation, to be developed using economies of scale. RIAN will seek to demonstrate the impact of research to potential funders who recognise the value of wider research dissemination.
The Irish government has purportedly identified growth in research as critical to its future as a knowledge economy. Raising the research profile is reportedly a critical strategy in the universities' strategic plans. The ability to showcase research output and identify institutional research strengths is seen to be extremely important in attracting new funding and high quality staff.
The development of RIAN was managed by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group. The 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.
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