Guided by the University’s pursuit of research excellence and relevance, the Library and Information Service provides a variety of services to support postgraduate students, academic staff, researchers, and postdoctoral fellows at each stage of the research lifecycle.

The Library and Information Service has signed agreements with several publishers that make it easier for SU researchers to publish open access (OA) with these publishers, and in some cases to even publish OA without paying any article processing charge (APC). Many of these agreements have been negotiated by the South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC), of which Stellenbosch University (SU) is a member.

Open access (OA) is the practice of providing unrestricted access normally associated with publisher copyright agreements via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles, theses and dissertations, and scholarly monographs and chapters in books. Access is immediate, online and freely available to the end user.

For more information about the open access agreements that have been signed please visit the link to access the open access publishing libguide.

Stellenbosch University Library and Information Service contains a wealth of information that is continually developed to cater to the needs of researchers and postgraduate students during their academic careers. As part of the curriculum, postgraduate students are often required to submit a research project and for this purpose, each faculty is well represented by a Faculty Librarian, who amongst other things can provide research support and training and e-learning to students and staff.

Faculty librarians offer collaborative support to researchers by helping them with measuring research impact, advice on publishing and open access sources.

They also provide the following training to postgraduate students and researchers which specifically target the use of the library website to find, locate and apply applicable information and data sources, e.g.:

• introduction to the relevant library guides
• literature searches
• literature reviews
• systematic reviews
• searching for information across multiple databases
• referencing

See your faculty’s/department’s library guides here and contact your faculty librarian directly for assistance.

The official launch of Library Research Week 2022 will be held on Monday, 16 May. It will consist of a panel discussion on Research ethics: friend or foe? Ethics play an important part in the research process from the initial stages of design to the final stages of reporting. Ethics committees in charge of research ethics processes are especially significant as they ensure that standards are met and that individuals and institutions are protected. This is especially significant since the promulgation of the POPI Act requires all researchers to ensure proper safeguards for personal information and the data collected for research purposes. Miscommunication can arise where ethical implications in applications may not always be made explicit. Ethics committees can approve, reject, modify or even prevent studies to continue, and this may cause researchers to regard ethics committees as unsympathetic towards their cause. This panel, consisting of researchers, experts and members of ethics committees will discuss challenges faced by researchers and ethics committees, and how they navigate through these challenges.​

The panellist will be Dr Marilize Burger (Division of Orthopaedic Surgery), Ms Katlego Mthelebofu (Faculty of Law) and Mr Jerall Toi (Information Governance). The discussion will be facilitated by Professor Ronelle Carolissen from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

Please book here

You are welcome to see the full programme for Library Research Week here.

Contact: Marié Roux

Data visualisation is an important part of the research process. Although spreadsheets and data tables will always be present in research, new types of visualisations are emerging to make information more accessible than before.

This year the offering of workshops offered by the Library on data visualisation will include the following:

• Overview of software for effective data analysis and data visualisation – Book for webinar of 5 April
• Principles of data visualisation – Book for webinar of 13 April
• Introduction to Tableau Public and RawGraphs for data visualisation – Book for webinar of 20 April
• Data Visualisation with Microsoft PowerBI – Book for webinar of 4 May

Researchers and students are also welcome to make use of the consultation service available on this topic.

Please contact Marié Roux for more information.

You might already have an ORCID ID, since it is compulsory to add your ID to any NRF application and use it when you publish a new article. But did you know that Stellenbosch University has an integration with ORCID? We would like to encourage you to connect your ORCID ID to your Stellenbosch University identity. Please follow this link and follow the steps below.

• First sign in to the SU portal
• You will be directed to the “Manage your researcher identities” page
• Click on the “Connect” button under ORCID
• If you already have an ORCID ID you will be able to sign in and authorise SU to view and update your ORCID profile
• If you don’t have an ID yet, click on “Register now”, complete the form and authorise SU to view and update your profile, all in one step!
• We encourage you to use your sun.ac.za email address to register.

It would be ideal to close the gap between how many researchers at Stellenbosch University have IDs versus how many have connected their IDs to the integration. See the graph below illustrating how many IDs were created and how many IDs were connected between 2013-2021.

If you need any assistance with creating and/or connecting your ORCID iD, please contact:

Marié Roux / Kirchner van Deventer / Your faculty librarian

Read the ORCID library guide

Register for the next ORCID workshop (10 May 2022)

Do you know about this helpful Library Guide that assists you with all the aspects of the research process?  It follows all the steps involved with conducting research, from the planning phase, data collection, the writing process, archiving, publishing, and measuring your impact. Where the Library is not involved, you will be referred to the correct information elsewhere on campus.

Please contact us if you need further assistance with any of these steps.