Workshop facilitators from ASSAf, Ms Susan Veldsman and Ms Ina Smith with the organisers, Ms Faith Bhengu and Professor Carol Bertram. Also pictured are academics, journal managers librarians and academic computing staff who attended the workshop. Learning about Online, Open Access Journal Management
An informative two-day workshop was recently held to provide journal editors and managers with information about the Open Journal System (OJS). This comes as more and more scholarly journals are making the transition from traditional print to online open access publishing.
Ms Susan Veldsman and Ms Ina Smith from the Scholarly Publications Unit at the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) facilitated the workshop at which editors of journals, based at UKZN, received training on how to use the OJS to manage their journals online.
The workshop also provided information on the implications of hosting a journal on this platform and also provided hands-on training to editors to set up their journal online with OJS.
The University of KwaZulu-Natal has installed the Open Journal Systems (non-profit open source software) which can be used to manage and publish journals in a professional way. This is an alternative to commercial, for-profit online software.
Some journal editors started to set up their online journals which are hosted on http://journals.ukzn.ac.za/
The workshop was organised by Professor Carol Bertram, an academic from the School of Education and Ms Faith Bhengu, the Principal Librarian from the College of Humanities. It was funded by the University’s Teaching and Learning Office.
UKZN Academic Computing is committed to supporting the OJS software. Staff members Mr Richman Dlamini and Mr Vasu Chetty also attended the workshop.
Editors at the workshop committed to forming an Online Editor’s Forum in order to provide a community of support and to lobby the university to support journals which are using OJS as their platform to go online.