Browsing by Subject "scholarly communication"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Open Access
    National environmental scan of South African scholarly publishing
    (2009-04-30) Gray, Eve
    Undertaken as part of the OpeningScholarship project at the University of Cape Town (UCT), this position paper reviews the national environment for the use of ICTs for research dissemination and publication in the South African higher education sector. Taking UCT as a case study, the paper reviews the use of ICTs for scholarly communications for research, teaching and learning, and community engagement in the university against the background of international developments and best practice.
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    Open Access
    Open access in South Africa: a case study and reflections
    (2014) Czerniewicz, Laura; Goodier, Sarah
    In this paper, we locate open access in the South African higher education research context where it is, distinctively, not shaped by the policy frameworks that are profoundly changing research dissemination behaviour in other parts of the world. We define open access and account for its rise by two quite different routes. We then present a case study of journal publishing at one South African university to identify existing journal publishing practices in terms of open access. This case provides the springboard for considering the implications - both positive and negative - of global open access trends for South African - and other - research and researchers. We argue that academics' engagement with open access and scholarly communication debates is in their interests as global networked researchers whose virtual identities and online scholarship are now a critical aspect of their professional engagement.
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    Metadata only
    OpeningScholarship
    (2014-08-21) Gray, Eve; Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Willmers, Michelle
    Publication output from the 2007/2008 OpeningScholarship project which ran in the Centre for Educational Technology (CET) at the University of Cape Town. The main aim of this project was to explore the opportunities that information communication technologies and open dissemination models could offer for enhanced communication and more effective knowledge dissemination at UCT. These resources could be useful in strategic examination of how technology can be applied in higher education endeavour and case studies provide insight into particular UCT initiatives.
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    Restricted
    Power and Politics in a changing scholarly communication landscape
    (Purdue University Libraries, 2013) Czerniewicz, Laura
    In recent times the nature of scholarship has both remained consistent to its core principles, and undergone profound changes. Despite numerous high-flown claims, no-one knows how these will play out. This paper describes the digitally-mediated changes which are in process throughout the familiar scholarly cycle, and considers the issues – including for librarians, curators and scholars - which arise from these changes.
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    Open Access
    Visibility of Scholarly Research and Changing ResearchCommunication Practices: A Case Study from Namibia
    (IGI Global, 2016-09-27) Kell, Catherine; Czerniewicz, Laura
    Scholars globally are increasingly required to account for the visibility and impact of their research, and visibility and impact are increasingly digitally-mediated through the platforms and practices associated with Web 2.0. Traditional prestige-based metrics of visibility (ISI/WoS Impact Factor) measure only scholar-to-scholar outputs like journals and books. In many African universities with nascent research cultures, legacies of colonialism and imperatives of national development, these measures present scholars with particular challenges. This paper reveals the pressures shaping African research communication practices and the visibility of research, using data from a case study at the University of Namibia.
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    Open Access
    Why Southern African Scholars Conduct Research: A Comparative Study of Values
    (2014-08-14) Trotter, Henry
    Why do scholars conduct and disseminate research? This is a foundational question in academia, though one that is usually taken for granted in the literature on scholarly values and attitudes. Most studies – which typically focus on scholars from the global North – tend to assess academics’ feelings about research-related issues such as academic peer review, dissemination outlets for scholarly outputs, perceptions of journal quality, digital and Web 2.0 technologies, open access publishing and academic identity. They shed light on scholars’ attitudes toward elements of their research and communication practices, but they do not get at the more basic question of why scholars conduct research in the first place. In Africa, where most universities have only recently incorporated a research mission into what have long been teaching-oriented institutions, the question of why scholars conduct research is a pertinent one, and the answers cannot be assumed. Moreover, the purpose of university research on the continent is shaped by more than just the desires of the scholars themselves, but by those of their national governments, their institutions’ managers, students, overseas funders, local NGOs and community stakeholders. Thus all of these competing interests impact how scholars view the research enterprise. As part of its work of mapping scholarly communication activity systems in Southern Africa, the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) tried to answer this foundational question by examining regional scholars’ motivations for conducting and disseminating research. Between 2010 and 2013, it engaged with four different faculties in four different universities (the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia) so that the regions’ scholarly research and communication activities would be assessed with an eye for how disciplinary, institutional and national factors impacted scholars’ research values. In this paper, we explore the scholarly values motivating the production and dissemination of research in these four Southern African universities.