The SEALS Digital Commons contains the digital collections of the academic institutions in the Eastern Cape, South Africa.
In 1998 the South East Academic Libraries System (SEALS) was established by the academic libraries as an informal academic library forum in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. SEALS became a formal academic library consortium in 1999, with the vision to create a virtual library for the Eastern Cape. The member libraries are from the Nelson Mandela University, Rhodes University, University of Fort Hare, and Walter Sisulu University.
In 2016 Rhodes University Library implemented the Rhodes Hosted Journals service. The Rhodes Hosted Journals service complements the Seals Digital Commons in that together these systems provide an established platform for scholarly communication.
Southern African Journal of Gerontology
The Rhodes Hosted Journals service runs on the Open Journal System System (OJS), a journal management system developed by PKP (Public Knowledge Project). The service is intended to improve and expand access to research and to support scholarly journal publication processes by optimising article level discovery (linked data environment, including link resolvers, indices and harvesters).
Repositories are a vital element of the scholarly communication infrastructure. However, the community needs to work hard to get the actual content.
This report describes a number of profiles of sustainable practices for populating repositories. The practices described here are based on a review of repository activities around the world, and represent a variety of institutional and jurisdictional contexts.
The practices fall into three broad categories:
The repository community was born out of an environment of cooperation, openness and innovation. The practices profiled here reflect these traditions and represent creative approaches to staffing, imaginative software developments, and adoption of novel policies.
Read the Report Here: http://www.coar-repositories.org/files/Sustainable-best-practices_final.pdf.
Meredith Wisner (Pratt Institute)
Open access institutional repositories were created to promote access to information, encourage scholarly communication, and demonstrate institutional prestige. While these repositories have been widely adopted, the quality of their contents often fails to represent their institution’s scholarly output. Moreover, current research uses measurements of quantity, not quality, to assess their value. In response, this article opens new areas of scholarly inquiry by assessing the quality of contents. This is accomplished through a cross-sectional study of repositories at American colleges...