UCT launches open monograph publishing

With the launch of UCT Libraries’ Open Monograph Publishing in January this year, the university has joined a handful of international academic libraries that publish freely accessible scholarly books.

Scholars and information seekers around the world now have unrestricted access to and reuse of the books or monographs published on the Open Monograph Press platform.

The development, a first for Africa, is part of UCT’s open access strategy to showcase institutional scholarship broadly, and supports the university’s teaching, learning and research enterprises.

Although UCT was a latecomer to the international open access arena (the OpenUCT institutional repository was launched in 2014), it now has over 15 000 scholarly items publically available.

Three new titles will soon join the two already launched and include UCT Libraries’ renowned Handbook on Citation.

UCT’s open access strategy now includes diamond open access publishing (books and journals, the latter via Open Journal Systems) and institutional repository publishing (research articles, theses, dissertations and open education resources).

• For more information, contact the Scholarly Communications and Publishing office, 021 650 1263, or email openuct@uct.ac.za

Unrestricted access: UCT Libraries has launched Open Monograph Publishing, which allows books to be globally accessed on the Open Monograph Press platform. In the picture are OpenUCT’s Lena Nyahodza (left) and Jill Claassen. Photo by Michael Hammond.