Sharing your research via OpenUCT
CHED’s Marketing and Communications Committee and the Faculty Research Committee have organised a series of information sessions to encourage and enable CHED academics to share their research online.
Last year, CHED academics were provided the space to get a feel for and then populate their UCT Researcher Profiles. This week saw the first of two sessions that dealt with how academics could share their research using OpenUCT.
The session was led by Jill Claassen, Scholarly Communications and Publishing manager and Lena Nyahodza, Scholarly Communications officer, both from UCT Libraries.
Jill reminded participants of the principles of Open Access and introduced them to the University’s Open Access policy. She then went on to reveal the benefits of sharing one’s research on OpenUCT. These included:
- Ensuring your research is discoverable via Google
- Increasing the impact, visibility and usage of your research
- Providing new contacts and possibly resulting in research partnerships
- Securing storage, stability, and longevity of your files.
According to the Webometrics Ranking of Repositories, OpenUCT is currently ranked 8th in South Africa, 8th in Africa, and 370th (out of some 2500 repositories) in the world. Its high ranking is directly linked to the impact and visibility of the research output that it makes available.
At the end of the session, Lena guided academics through the process of uploading content to the repository.
Jill and Lena will be back on the 2nd of June to chat to more CHED academics about this topic. We’re hoping to see more of CHED’s valuable research shared on OpenUCT as a direct consequence of these sessions.