DSpace@ScienceUofK to be presented next week at Open Access Africa 2011 Conference

  The OASCIR project for setting up the recently released DSpace@ScienceUofK, the first Sudanese institutional repository for the Faculty of Science University of Khartoum, will be presented in a talk at the forthcoming Open Access Africa 2011 Conference.
This event, to be held Oct 25-26 at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana, will offer the opportunity to discuss the ways Open Access is spreading across Africa, both through Open Access journals and repositories (see event programme).

Since the idea for having an institutional repository at the University of Khartoum did arise last November along the first OAA Conference held in Nairobi, the OASCIR project managers thought -and so they wrote at the OASCIR Training Week report last Aug- it would be a special way of celebrating first anniversary of the project birth.

DSpace@ScienceUofK featured in OpenDOAR and ROAR

  One of the first steps after releasing a new Open Access repository is having it registered on the international repository directories - thus providing it a sort of birth certificate. In order to be registered in such directories, the repository OAI-PMH protocol for metadata harvesting must be properly working, so being featured in those means the new repository is in equal terms (from a functional viewpoint) with the other 2000+ OA repositories currently operating worldwide.


As of Oct 18th, a week after its release, DSpace@ScienceUofK is already registered with both OpenDOAR, the University of Nottingham-based Directory of Open Access Repositories, and ROAR, the Southampton-based Registry of Open Access Repositories. OpenDOAR features the University of Khartoum repository along with the Sali Library English Literature Collection as the two only Open Access repositories in Sudan - DSpace@ScienceUofK being actually the only Institutional one so far.

DSpace@ScienceUofK is now LIVE

  The first Sudanese Institutional Repository has been released today and is now openly available at http://oascir.uofk.edu/. DSpace@ScienceUofK repository is the result of the EIFL-funded OASCIR project for carrying out an Open Access awareness-raising campaign at the Faculty of Science, University of Khartoum and setting up an institutional repository for serving researchers and professors with this affiliation.

DSpace@ScienceUofK goes live with over 175 records in its database, most of them available full-text. Along forthcoming weeks there will be an effort to increase the available number of contents filed in the repository. Some additional functionality -such as an Arabic interface- is still being developed for the repository and will
shortly be available.

OASCIR highlighted in SCAP News #4

  The Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) News featured the OASCIR project among the highlighted stories in its issue number 4 (September 2011). The SCAP Programme is a three-year initiative funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and aimed at increasing the publication and visibility of African research through harnessing the potential for scholarly communication in the digital age.