9th ADEA-WGHE/AAU Webinar: Promoting High Quality Open Access Journals in African Higher Education

Published on Wednesday, 12 April 2017

Introduction

The Internet (specifically the World Wide Web) has made it possible for scholarly journals to be easily managed, shared and accessed. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ – www.doaj.org) was launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden, with 300 open access journals and today contains more than 9000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.  The Directory also provides immediate links to nearly 2.500.000 articles.

DOAJ is a globally available community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals and covers journals published in 129 countries and more than 50 languages. As more and more governments, research councils and universities issue open access policies and mandates DOAJ has developed into the authorative listing where those stakeholders and libraries and researchers consult to discover good open access publishing channels. It has become very important for open access journals to be listed and to generate much more visibility, discoverability and impact. All Open Access scholarly journals are encouraged to apply for possible inclusion. This webinar will discuss criteria a high quality Open Access journal needs to adhere to, in order to be included in DOAJ. During this presentation, criteria will be shared in order for all Open Access journals to be able to produce successful applications to pass the detailed evaluation done by DOAJ.

Objectives

The main objectives of this webinar presentation are to:

  1. Provide insights as to how DOAJ evaluates journals for inclusion.
  2. Explore the foundation of the DOAJ criteria and the importance for promoting best Open Access publishing.
  3. Highlight key criteria in relation to the Open Access Statement, Licensing Conditions, Copyrights issues, Archiving, Plagiarism Control and more.
  4. Underline some of the most common identifiers for questionable, unethical publishing practice and as well highlight the benefits for journals to be listed in DOAJ.

Expected outputs

The expected outputs of the webinars are:

  1. Participants will have a good understanding of best publishing practices.
  2. Participants will be in a better position to advice researchers on good publishing channels and better informed as to how to produce successful applications for journals to be listed in DOAJ.

Deliverables

The deliverables of the webinar are: 

  1. Presentation .
  2. Interaction with various participants and stakeholders. 
  3. Lessons learned from the presentation as well as the questions and answer (Q/A) session.

Information On The Webinar Presentation

Date: Thursday, 20th April, 2017

Time: 12:00 GMT

Venue: Online (Adobe Connect Platform) 

Organizers:  This Webinar is organized by the Association for Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) through its Working Group on Higher Education (WGHE), hosted by the Association of African Universities (AAU).

Target Audience

This Webinar is open to all - most especially, Librarians, publishers, editors, media and communication experts, teachers, researchers and students

How To Participate

  1. Register at www.aau.org/webinars
  2. Webinar will be livestreamed on: https://meet53484183.adobeconnect.com/wghetalks/
  3. Make sure you have Adobe flash player installed on your device (computer, smartphones etc.)

Live Tweeting and Event Hashtag:

  1. Join the conversation following #WGHETalks and share your comments and questions.
  2. Follow our webinar via our social media channels:

AAU  @AAU_67      |    AAU  AAU    |    ADEA  @ADEAnet    |    ADEA  ADEAnet

For any further information, please contact the following phone numbers for assistance: (+233) 302.77.44.95/ 71.55.88, (+233) 243.29.84.64 or email us at kasam@aau.org and ndhlamini@aau.org

Webinar Presenter :  Lars Bjornshauge

Lars Bjornshauge is currently the Founder and Managing Director of DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals- www.doaj.org), Co-founder of Infrastructure Services for Open Access (is4oa.org), Co-founder of the Directory of Open Access Repositories,  (www.opendoar.org) and Co-founder of the Directory of Open Access Books (www.doabooks.org). He was the Deputy Director, Acting Director of the Technical Information Center of Denmark Technical University (1992-2000), Director of Libraries at Lund University, Sweden (2001-2011), SPARC Europe Director of European Library Relations (2012-2016), President of the Danish Research Library Association (1992-1994), 1st Vice-President of the Swedish Library Association (2005-2011).