Since launched in November 2009, there is a steady growth of UJDigispace institutional repository. The Institutional Repository and Scholarly Communication librarian was appointed in February 2010, and has since piloted the process as a learning curve. The repository currently has 3107 items, of which 2078 are theses and dissertations (June 2010).
The launch of the Open Access Mandate by the University would propel the UJLIC to increase these numbers in lue of the institutional and faculty self-archiving of accredited and non-accredited journal papers, conference proceedings and book chapters. This approach will in the long term seem to be a major step towards providing open access to UJ research output. While waiting for the approval of the OA mandate UJLIC is creating new strategies for the operation of the institutional repository and the development of archiving policies as opposed to the self-archiving by authors. UJLIC’s UJDigispace immediate plan is to catch-up and compete with its peers, the University of Pretoria, UNISA and University of Stellenbosch who are now mandating all research output to be deposited in the IR. However copyright transfer agreements (CTAs) that are signed by an author prior to publication which often indicate whether, and in what form, self-archiving is allowed still remains a stumbling block. But UJLIC will embark on a full scale marketing of the IR and copyright awareness once the OA mandate is in place.
IR WORLD RANKING
UJDigispace was in the 287 position among the 800 Institutional repositories across the globe Jujly 2010.
“The Ranking Web of World Repositories” is compiled by the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones CientÃficas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain. The rankings have been published since 2006. The rankings are based principally on the number of links into the repository from external websites, demonstrating the impact of an institution’s research on the rest of the Web.
The July Webometrics Ranking for Institutional Repositories is available (23 July 2010) at http://repositories.webometrics.info/top800_rep.asp?offset=250 list South African entries and positions as follows:-
261 Rhodes University Eresearch Repository
759 Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Institutional Repository and Scholarly Communication Specialist
Date: 22 July 2010
