Open Access Week: 19-23 October 2020

During Open Access Week, from 19-23 October 2020, the Department of Library Services arranged a series of webinars with the theme: ‘Shifting the boundaries of your research impact’, which was followed by an Open Access Colloquium on 26 October 2020. 

The first webinar, on ‘Bibliometrics’, was presented by Sunette Steynberg (UP Department of Library Services) and provided a comparison and an analysis of the impact of UP articles published in paid-for journals versus those published in open access journals over the past five years. This was followed by a webinar on ‘Altmetrics’, presented by Ben McLeish from the bibliometric company, who gave an overview of the Altmetric system and discussed the value of altmetrics for researchers. 

The second day’s webinar, presented by Marguerite Nel (UP Department of Library Services), focused on ‘Open access publishing processing charges’. This presentation covered different open access publishing models, issues relating to authors’ rights and initiatives, and support provided by the University and Library to assist the UP research community with making their work available through open access publishing. 

On the third day, a webinar on ‘Open access publishing: How to avoid the web of predatory publishers’ was presented by Denise Nicholson from the University of the Witwatersrand, who provided an overview of open access publishing and offered some useful tips on where to publish and how to avoid being caught up in the so-called ‘web of predatory publishers’. 

The two webinars presented on the fourth day covered the topics: ‘How to upload theses and dissertations onto UPSpace’, presented by Tlou Mathiba (UP Department of Library Services) and ‘How to upload datasets onto the UP Data Repository (Figshare)’, presented by Johann van Wyk (UP Department of Library Services). Tlou gave a general overview of the UPSpace repository, covering the processes of acquiring/uploading research articles and electronic theses and dissertations, and included a demonstration on how to self-submit a thesis or dissertation to UPSpace. Johann discussed the background of Figshare, gave an overview of its functionalities and concluded by demonstrating how a dataset can be uploaded to Figshare. 

The final webinar on the fifth day dealt with the topic ‘Researcher profiles and tools to enhance research impact’ and was presented by Sunette Steynberg (UP Department of Library Services), who discussed and illustrated a number of researcher profiles, such as Google Scholar, Scopus Author ID, ORCID, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, LinkedIn and Publons. 

These webinars were very popular and were attended by people from across the country and even from abroad. The overall response received from attendees was very positive, as is evident from the comments received, for example: ‘Thank you colleagues for this excellent webinar week. I appreciate your vision and hard work. I think the library came back with a bang’ and ‘Excellently presented and very informative. Thank you for all the hard work! The library has gained a lot by hosting these excellent and professional webinars. Keep up the good work! Looking forward to next year’s Open Access Week!’ 

Next year we plan to present a similar series on open access that will focus pressing issues in the Open Access environment.