Ireland

According to the Irish Higher Education Authority, there are seven universities in Ireland: University College Dublin (UCD), University College Cork (UCC), the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG), the National University of Ireland Maynooth (NUIM), Trinity College Dublin, Dublin City University and the University of Limerick. St. Patrick’s College Maynooth (The Pontifical University) is included by the Irish Higher Education Authority as an eighth university.

In addition to the universities, an important part of the Irish Higher Education infrastructure is the thirteen Institutes of Technology located throughout the country.

There are currently four Open Acess repositories in Higher Education institutions in Ireland are:

Dublin City University
National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Trinity College Dublin and
Waterford Institute of Technology

There is also a subject repository at the Irish Virtual Research Library & Archive, UCD, and two Government Agency repositories: the Health Services Executive and the All-Ireland electronic Health Library (AIeHL).

In trems of initiatives, Ireland has at its disposal the IREL-Open Project (Irish Research Electronic Library-Open Project) and the IUA (Irish Universities Association) Librarian's Group (Coordinating body).

IREL Project

Irish universities have received government funding to build institutional repositories in each Irish university and to develop a federated harvesting and discovery service via a national portal. It is intended that this collaboration will be expanded to embrace all Irish research institutions in the future.

This is a three-year project starting in April 2007, directed by the Irish Universities Association and managed by the Irish Universities Association Librarians’ Group.

Other associated projects include the NDLR (National Digital Learning Repository); ExpertiseIreland.com and the RISE Group (Research Information Systems Exchange).
Ireland also has a number of OA journals which can be found on DOAJ.

With regard to copyright issues, a list of Irish publishers’ copyright policies similar to the SHERPA/ RoMEO list is a deliverable of the 3-year SAOR Project.

Furthermore, the projects funded by Irish Higher Education Authority's Structural Innovation Fund (SIF) are committed to the application of standards for interoperability and to seek opportunities to exploit synergies. Work on interoperability is ongoing within and between the IREL-Open Project, individual institutional repositories, the National Digital Learning Repository (NDLR), various digitisation projects, current research information systems (CRISs) at local level and ExpertiseIreland.com at national level.

The DRIVER wiki may be a useful source of further information.

Are there developments in this country that you would like to inform the DRIVER community about? If so, please visit the DRIVER wiki. There you will find guest editors' contributions to the countries pages. Information about the easy process of editing pages and how to obtain a password can be found on the wiki under "PmWiki Software". We look forward to your visit.

Last updated: 14-Nov-2008