Training course on Open Access and DSpace@ScienceUofK for researchers

  On July 27th the first session of the second, research-focussed training course on Open Access and the DSpace@ScienceUofK institutional repository was held at the Old Lecture Theatre in the University of Khartoum. Among the attendance there were representatives from all Faculty of Science Departments (i.e. Botany, Chemistry, Geology, Physics and Zoology, plus the Sudan National History Museum). Representatives from other organisations external to University of Khartoum such as the Nile College and the Red Sea University did also attend the presentation, which dealt with the opportunities for progress of the Open Access movement in Africa, the various kinds of available Open Access repositories and Open Access policies and the ways to tackle eventual copyright issues when depositing research works into DSpace@ScienceUofK.


Faculty of Science U of K researchers were very interested in this new way for disseminating their research output and posed relevant questions as for instance how can the quality of research works submitted to the repository be assessed, whether non published papers may be filed into the IR, and whether publishing a research paper into DSpace@ScienceUofK may be considered an alternative to traditional publishing.

There were also questions on the procedure University of Khartoum should follow in order to sign the Berlin Declaration, thus becoming a new institutional member of the spreading community supporting the Open Access movement.


U. Kamal Salih, a member of the team who created the Greenstone-based Open Access repository for the Sali Library English Literature collection, did also attend the session, so the OASCIR project managers had the chance to learn about previous experiencies. The Sali repository, developed at the Sudan Libraries & Information Association (SILA), was the only Sudanese Open Access repository so far, and, since DSpace@ScienceUofK hasn't yet been released save for the University of Khartoum IP range, it remains the only Sudanese one listed in the OpenDOAR directory.