Effective Investment in Research - the Irish Research eLibrary (IReL)

Many, many blogs, discussions and articles recently have been devoted to the subject of continued investment in Irish research. This week's Irish Times Innovation Magazine, for example, devotes several articles to the topic.

Part of the growing body of evidence providing support for continued funding for research in Ireland comes from the IReL Impact Survey, undertaken by the IUA libraries and the RCSI in Spring 2009. 5465 researchers responded to the survey.

IReL, the Irish Research eLibrary funded by SFI (Science Foundation Ireland) and the HEA (Higher Education Authority) includes such well-known names as Academic Press (ScienceDirect), Academic Search Premier, ACS, Blackwell Synergy, Business Source Premier, Datastream, IEEE, JSTOR, LexisNexis, Nature, Oxford University Press, SciFinder Scholar, Springer/Kluwer, Web of Knowledge, and Wiley InterScience.

Not surprisingly, given this content, 98% of researchers with a definite view agreed that IReL contributes to increased competitiveness of Irish research internationally, with one survey respondent commenting that in fact IReL is "by far the wisest and most important funding decision taken in Ireland for the third level sector. It truly enables research in Ireland."

Another survey respondent commented:

“This is a no-brainer. Having access to all the same information as our competitors means that we have caught up with and in many cases overtaken them. With the resources issue gone, it’s just a question of who has the best ideas.”

This last point is interesting. We have access to the resources now, but are we having the good ideas? Is there a correlation between the quality of information available, the input, and the quality of research being done, the output? Certainly, we believe that there is a link, but no study has ever managed to put figures on the link.

Until now.

In April 2009 a UK report from the Research Information Network (RIN) - E-journals: their use, value and impact - found that

“There is a clear correlation between levels of use of e-journals and research outcomes, with more usage linked to the number of papers published, number of PhD awards and income from research grants and contracts. This link is independent of institution size."

Professor David Nichols of the Center for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) at University College London summarised the report's findings in a podcast at July's RIN event The e-journals revolution: how the use of scholarly journals is shaping research:

1. Journals are the lifeblood of the UK research community.
2. The best researchers are also the best users of journals.
3. The volume of usage of ejournals is phenomenal.

The first finding matches the IReL evidence for Ireland, and the last finding is corroborated in Ireland by the detailed usage reports submitted regularly to IReL funders and IUA librarians. (In 2007, for example, over a quarter of a million articles were downloaded from just over 400 Science Direct journals across the seven Irish universities. Source: Usage of IReL Resources in 2007, Report of the Monitoring Group, October 2008, unpublished.)

Finding 2, that the best researchers are also the best users of journals, is of particular interest and merits further investigation. To that end, Phase 2 of the RIN project, to be completed in Spring 2010, is to involve interviews with approximately two hundred scientists, researchers and students.

In the meantime, Irish researchers are in no doubt as to the value of the e-resources currently available to them. Asked how a discontinuation of IReL would affect them, researchers said that it would be "a return to the stone age", "a devastating blow", "unthinkable". It is to be hoped that decision makers take note.