Yesterday we attended a seminar organized by the Centre for Educational Technology titled "Open Access in a Closed Institution". The presenter Hussein Suleman is a senior lecturer with the department of Computer Science here at [University of Cape Town] and is an ambassador and expert on the open access movement. ...
Here at UCT the idea of an open access repository for research has been under discussion for some time. Certainly our research output is scattered throughout the internet and in journals around the world, but can we account for it and provide details about it? Can we tell how many times those articles have been cited, or read? An open access digital archive could answer some of these questions.
Hussein has developed the UCT CS Research Document Archive for the Department of Computer Science here at UCT simply because he could not wait any longer for a university wide initiative to happen. They now archive their publications and are able to provide details of how and when articles were accessed. The Law Faculty has also felt the need for a digital archive for their own research and have launched UCT Lawspace which also powers dSpace. So it is clear that a unified system would be of great benefit if not only for these two faculties. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 4/16/2009 04:15:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.