In acknowledgement of the Open Access Week I have initiated a mini-seminar for the UJ Faculty of Science academics and postgraduate students on 23 October 2012. For venue, I selected one of the available lecture halls, which happen to be convenient, as it was close to the Sciences departments. Thirteen (13) researchers, Masters and PhD students were in attendance from Biochemistry, Chemistry and Botany Departments.

At the seminar we had also six (6) representatives from the library: the information librarians for Education, Health Sciences, Engineering and Law; the UJ Institutional Repository and Archival staff, the UJ Copyright officer who helped with a few queries from the audience.

Guest speaker at the seminar was Johanna Kuhn from BioMed Central. Johanna talked about OA and how it can benefit citation output, about publishing articles in OA journals and various membership options available to institutions. Pavlinka Kovatcheva, Faculty Librarian for Sciences (myself), also presented on Open Access for research, while my focus was on what OA resources are available for researchers.

A short survey was conducted at the end of the seminar.  Overall the attendees found the seminar valuable to learn more about Open Access. When asked if given the choice, will they select an OA journal to publish their article, 16 reply “yes”, while 1 was not sure. Also 16 of the attendees believed that UJDigispace (Institutional Repository) will impact positively on the University of Johannesburg research output. One of the PhD researcher's commented that "it was a great opportunity to see so many open access resources. It was an eye opener".

For me it was a good experience and exercise to organise the mini-seminar and be part of the Open Access Week and member the UJ OA committee this year. Best wishes for everyone around the World!

You can visit my Open Access Portal on: http://ujscienceslibrarynews.wordpress.com/open-access-oa/

Pictures from the event are available here: http://www.openaccessweek.org/photo/albums/uj-sciences-librarian-oa...