First digital Directory of Irish Publishers launching on Bloomsday 2023

Publishing Ireland > News > First digital Directory of Irish Publishers launching on Bloomsday 2023

First digital Directory of Irish Publishers launching on Bloomsday 2023

The first digital Directory of Irish Publishers is being launched on Bloomsday 2023 by PublishOA.ie [available at www.PublishOA.ie]. The directory is the first digital all-island map of the Irish publishing landscape, listing over 180 active book and journal publishers. From Belfast to Bantry and from Dublin to the Galway Gaeltacht, Irish publishers are active as never before.

The Directory of Irish Publishers reveals the wide range of Irish publishing, including fiction and non-fiction, scholarly, reference, professional, Irish language, children’s and young people, lifestyle, culture and more. From Irish language comic books to astrophysics, history and archaeology to fiction and poetry, thrillers and crime to legal textbooks, the Directory of Irish Publishers reveals the rich publishing ecosystem in Ireland today.

The Directory of Irish Publishers is the work of PublishOA.ie – the research consortium funded by the National Open Access Forum (NORF) – which is conducting an all-island feasibility study into creating a comprehensive Open Access digital infrastructure designed to meet the needs of authors, readers, publishers and funders in Irish scholarly publishing.

The PublishOA.ie research consortium has 10 partners and is co-led by the Royal Irish Academy and the Trinity Long Room Arts & Humanities Research Institute. There are eight affiliate organisations.

Commenting on the Directory, Ruth Hegarty, project lead of PublishOA.ie and the Managing Editor of the Royal Irish Academy said ‘Ulysses was published by a brave publisher who took a risk on a dangerous book. I’m delighted to publish such a diverse list of publishers on the island and look forward to working with them over the coming year’.

Professor Eve Patten, Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub stated: ‘We welcome the Directory of Irish publishers as a valuable step in creating a national response to the Open Access publishing revolution and to supporting Irish research scholarship into the future.’

Lucy Hogan, PublishOA.ie manager who compiled the directory said ‘The aim in compiling this Directory is to create a snapshot of the publishing landscape in Ireland, which we hope will prove useful to publishers, authors, readers and others. This iteration will be updated next Bloomsday, 2024.’

Notes to Editors:

Open Access publishing is the practice of providing online access to scholarly information that is free of charge to the user and is reusable, as opposed to the traditional subscription model in which readers have access to scholarly information by paying a subscription (usually via libraries).

The European Union Commission supports Open Access for research funded by the EU. Currently all peer-reviewed scientific publications arising from Horizon Europe funding have to be made available in open access. This means that publications are to be made freely available online, immediately upon publication and with no restrictions on use, either by deposit in a public digital repository or publication in an open access journal.

In Ireland the National Framework on the Transition to an Open Research Environment (NORF) report was published in 2019. NORF’s objective aligns with a European Commission recommendation to member states in 2018.

The funding for the PublishOA.ie project was approved by the National Open Research Forum (NORF) at the end of 2022 and is supported by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) and the Government of Ireland. The project will run until November 2024. Its aim is to conduct a feasibility study into creating a national Open Access publishing platform for Ireland.

NORF projects such as PublishOA.ie are funded by the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (DFHERIS), as announced by Minister Simon Harris in 2022 and 2023.

PublishOA.ie partners:

Royal Irish Academy – RIA
Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute, TCD – TLRH
Technological University of the Shannon – TUS
University of Galway – UG
Publishing Ireland
Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology – IADT
Technological University Dublin – TUDublin
Munster Technological University – MTU
University of Limerick – UL
South East Technological University – SETU

PublishOA.ie affiliates:

Irish Humanities Alliance – IHA
United Nations Sustainable Development Academy at University College Dublin – UN SDSN
Directory of Open Access Journals – DOAJ
Finnish Federation of Learned Societies
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Queen’s University, Belfast – QUB
Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies – DIAS
JSTOR – Journal Storage

The project will produce the following deliverables:

Landscape report on Irish publishing
Directory of Irish Publishers
Survey of publishers
Open Access standards for publishers and authors
Technical specification for a national platform and its subsequent trials and piloting
Evaluation of such a platform’s financial sustainability in Ireland.

All of these will be reported on and archived publicly in the Digital Repository of Ireland.

For further information, contact Dr Jane Mahony, Trinity Long Room Hub, at mahonyjl@tcd.ie / 087 981 1598