Open Access @ Stellenbosch University

The Journal of Emerging African Scholarship (JEAS) is the first and currently only peer-reviewed journal based on the African continent publishing original scholarship written by undergraduate and honours students. Focused on publishing M.I.T (Multi-, Inter-, Transdisciplinary) research aimed at the African continent and its component parts.

Living by its motto Africa In Focus, Global In Impact, JEAS strives to promote African scholarship and pan-African cooperation in seeking to build Africa’s knowledge base from the ground up. JEAS also provides opportunities for masters and doctoral students to gain peer-review experience within the academic publishing environment.

Striving for excellence, JEAS follows the same procedures and requirements of academic peer-review and editorial policy of accredited journals. JEAS aims to become the first journal of its kind hosted on international indices and gain accreditation. We can be found at http://www.journals.ac.za/index.php/jeas.

A precious collection of the original botanical illustrations prepared for printing between 1912 and 1932 in Rudolf Marloth’s Flora of South Africa, has now been digitalised by the Stellenbosch University Library.

The collection of 176 plates contains the original illustrations by botanical artists such as Ethel May Dixie (1876-1973), Esther Smith (1878-1954), Florence Amy Thwaits and Peter McManus, with handwritten notes and instructions for the printers by Marloth.

Marloth (1855-1931) is regarded as one of South Africa’s greatest early botanists. He was a chemist and pharmacist who emigrated from Germany to the Cape of Good Hope in 1883. It is said that on the very first day of arriving in the Cape, he climbed Table Mountain and started collecting plants. Marloth’s association with Stellenbosch University started in 1888, when he was appointed as lecturer in Chemistry and Experimental Physics at the then Victoria College, the forerunner of Stellenbosch University today. In 1922 Stellenbosch University awarded him with an Honorary Doctorate in recognition of his contribution to the understanding and knowledge of the Cape Floral Kingdom.

Over the years, the Marloth family donated several of the original illustrations and plates to the Stellenbosch University Library. This collection has now been taken up in the SUNDigital Collections of the library. The Special Collections Division of the library also hosts many of his personal documents, correspondence and photographs.

Visit the digital collection at http://digital.lib.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.2/14646

The Department of Higher Education & Training (DHET) has recently issued a follow-up statement regarding predatory journals.

Some of the journals indicated as “possibly predatory” are not predatory.

The list of journals now labelled “not predatory” are as follows:

The Department of Higher Education & Training (DHET) recently highlighted the issue of predatory journals with regards to the recognition of research articles in accredited journals.

The DHET has now taken matters a step further and identified a list of predatory and possibly predatory journals.

Herewith the list of journals in both categories that will no longer be regarded as accredited:

List of predatory journals

List of possible predatory journals

Contact Daléne Pieterse (mver@sun.ac.za)  of the Division for Research Development if you have any questions in this regard.

In case you missed it…

The Library and Information Service invited Dr John Measey, senior researcher at the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology, to talk about Open Access as part of International Open Access week 2017 in October.

Dr Measey’s enticing presentation titled “I put my journal behind a paywall, so why am I talking to you about Open Access?” was partly based on his blog post “A rant for Open Access week”.

His “rant” was further supplemented by a piece entitled “Why do I like publishing with PeerJ?”.

The Office of Scholarly Communication is delighted to announce that Professor Stephen Hawking has given the University permission to make his thesis freely available and Open Access in Apollo. By making his PhD thesis open anyone in the world can now freely, and without any barriers, download and read this important piece of research by the world’s most recognizable scientist.

Professor Stephen Hawking’s 1966 doctoral thesis “Properties of expanding universes” (https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.11283) is the most requested item in the University of Cambridge’s Open Access repository, Apollo. The Apollo record for Prof. Hawking’s thesis is regularly viewed over 300 times per month, and since May 2017 the University has received over 200 requests from interested readers who want to download Prof. Hawking’s thesis. You can also view this seminal work on the University of Cambridge Digital Library: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PHD-05437/1

Read More…

BASE (operated by Bielefeld University Library) is one of the world’s most voluminous search engines for academic web resources.

BASE provides more than 100 million documents from more than 5,000 sources with access to the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access).

Stellenbosch University repository and journals hosting platforms – SUNScholar and SUNJournals – are also indexed in BASE.

Try it out at https://www.base-search.net/

Prof Johann Mouton of CREST and Astrid Valentine recently published a significant study on predatory publishing in SA in the South African Journal of Science.

This is the first study to analyse the extent of predatory publishing in South Africa.

The article is available from: http://www.sajs.co.za/extent-south-african-authored-articles-predatory-journals/johann-mouton-astrid-valentine