RIAN (www.rian.ie), an open access portal for Irish research, was officially launched yesterday by the Tánaiste, Mary Coughlan.RIAN allows federated searching of the Institutional Repositories of the 7 Irish Universities as well as that of Dublin Institute of Technology, making Irish research material freely accessible both here and internationally, thus increasing the research profiles of individual researchers and their institutions.
The site has been live since July of this year and is already showing extremely high usage rates. It provides enhanced searching and filtering on the contents of the repositories, which are also made available via other search engines such as Google Scholar.
RIAN is the end product of a 3-year project which included the completion of the individual University repositories within its remit. The project was equally funded by the Universities and the Government’s Strategic Innovation Fund which is administered by the Higher Education Authority. It was initiated and managed by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group. As RIAN develops it is intended to extend to other Irish research institutions.
