The Botswana Library Consortium will host a series of workshops, funded by EIFL, on open access (OA) journals, OA policies and OA institutional repositories (IRs) for researchers, research administrators, journals editors and publishers, and librarians.

The workshops will be facilitated by Ina Smith, Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) Planning Manager at the Academy of Science of South Africa; Robert Achang'a, from the School of Computing and Informatics, University of Nairobi, and Hilton Gibson, who is Ubuntu Linux System Administrator at Stellenbosch University.

The workshops will cover the following topics:

• Introduction to OA, policies and planning: increasing access to and preserving institutional research assets; planning for success; OA policy overview, and OA policy development;
• Managing and publishing OA journals using Open Journal Systems (OJS): introduction to OA journals; trends and developments; requirements for a high quality OA journal; setting up a journal using OJS; uploading content and publishing journal issues, and increasing the journal visibility and measuring impact;
• Managing and populating OA IRs using DSpace: introduction to IRs; trends and developments; guidelines for managing an IR; workflow, roles and responsibilities; populating the IR; marketing the IR; increasing visibility and measuring impact, and  capacity building for OA sustainability;
• Setting up, customizing and administrating OA repositories using DSpace software.

Read more about EIFL’s support for open access in Botswana.