*CODESRIA Conference Announcement*

Theme: "Putting African Scholarly Journals Online: Opportunities,

Implications and Challenges"

Venue: Dakar, Senegal;

Date: 6-7 October, 2008

Among the numerous challenges facing social research in Africa is the lack

of visibility for research output. Traditionally, research findings are

presented in conferences through conference papers which are subsequently

published as articles in scholarly journals, and eventually as books.

Presently, it is extremely difficult for researchers in the various social

science disciplines to publish in African journals, either because such

journals do not exist in their fields, or because those that exist are

published very irregularly or have discontinued publication. Rare are

African social science journals that are regular, and very few that manage

to be published benefit from good dissemination.

The reasons for this situation are first related to a chronic lack of

financial resources in higher education and research institutions, and in

the professional associations that publish journals, in a context where

there are very few commercial scholarly publishers. When these journals

manage to be published somehow, only a few copies are produced. Even then,

the journals published do not benefit from efficient distribution networks

and, besides, suffer from the slow and unreliable African mail systems,

resulting in limited distribution that seldom goes beyond the borders of the

countries in which the journals are published.

The consequences of such a situation are manifold. Apart from depriving

African social research of the means to enhance its visibility nationally

and internationally, the situation results in major hindrances to the

promotion of African academics and researchers. In fact, owing in particular

to the lack or irregularity of these publications, African higher education

and research institutions tend to put in place teacher and researcher

evaluation systems that privilege publications in scholarly journals

published in developed countries. The limited number of articles published

by African researchers in so-called "International Journals" is what is

taken into account by evaluation tools such as the Sciences Citations Index

for measuring the quality and importance of African social research, giving

of course a picture that is not in tune with reality.

With the advent of electronic journals since the beginning of the 1990s, new

publication opportunities have arisen. Produced and disseminated using ICT

facilities readily available today to many African higher education and

research institutions, electronic journals offer clear advantages in that

they do not involve significant production costs, are not limited in terms

of number of pages or use of colours for illustrations, do not entail

forwarding costs because they are published on the Web and, besides, are

available instantly and at any time wherever there is Internet access.

Further more, with the many specialised or non-specialised search engines

that index the Web, they are widely referenced and therefore, easy to view,

which increases significantly their dissemination and their impact.

Today, very few institutions of higher education and research in Africa

currently take advantage of the opportunities offered by electronic

journals. For examples, the African Journals Online (AJOL) project only

offers 271 titles on-line -including five (5) published by CODESRIA, namely

the CODESRIA Bulletin, Africa Development, Afrika Zamani, Identity, Culture

and Politics: An Afro-Asian Dialogue and the African Sociological Review -

of which 67% come from two countries, Nigeria (125) and South Africa (56).

Reasons for the low number and poor knowledge of electronic journals in

Africa include ignorance, distrust, defiance, resistance, lack of skills and

lack of equipment.

In the light of this situation and its challenges, CODESRIA has deemed it

useful to encourage African social scientists actively involved in research,

publishers who disseminate the results of such research, and the information

professionals who collect, indicate and promote the research, to debate and

discuss the different issues raised around electronic journals, in order to

better promote their knowledge and development. To that end, the four

sub-themes below have been identified:

(1) Strategic, scientific, individual and institutional

considerations: migration from paper to digital forms vs creation of new

journals; fully on-line editorial process vs putting on-line the final

content; proprietary software vs free software; trust/distrust/defiance

towards electronic journals, taking into account vs rejection for the

evaluation of researchers, validation process and scientific quality,

attitudes, behaviours and motivation of researchers, etc.

(2) Dissemination and storage methods: complementarity/substitution

with paper format, free, restricted or paying access, per case vs

subscription-based access, dissemination format (HTML, PDF, XML, etc),

referencing (description and indexation), support and sustainability of

archiving (paper, CDROM, etc), etc;

(3) Economy of electronic journals: implications in terms of human

resources, cost of technical devices, commercial viability, intellectual

property and copyrights, alternative copyright (Creative Commons and

Copyleft Licences, Design Science License, etc), information as universal

public good, publishing market vs knowledge market, etc.

(4) Experience feedback and projects: experience sharing, comparative

studies, lessons drawn from successes and failures, projects, etc.

Researchers with an active interest in issues pertaining to the use of

information and communication technologies in higher education and research

in Africa who wish to be part of the conference are invited to send their

abstracts of the papers they wish to present to CODESRIA by a deadline of 7

June, 2008. Authors of abstracts will be notified of the outcome of the

selection exercise by 21 July, 2008. Full papers from abstracts that are

selected must reach the CODESRIA Secretariat by 7 September, 2008. The

participation costs of those whose papers are accepted for presentation at

the conference will be covered fully or partly by CODESRIA. All abstracts

and papers should be addressed to:

CODESRIA

(Conference on electronic publishing and diffusion),

BP 3304, Dakar CP 18524, Senegal.

Tel.: +221-33 825 98 22/23

Fax: +221-33 824 12 89

E-mail: electronic.publishing@codesria.sn

Website: http://www.codesria.org/

*CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication* *OAI5*

Presentations availablehttp://indico.cern.ch/conferenceOtherViews.py?view=standard&confId=5710.

South African representatives

http://indico.cern.ch/confRegistrantsDisplay.py/list?order=down&sessionShowNoValue=1&sortBy=Country&confId=5710#results

• OAIS Workshop

9th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The ETD 2006 Conference proceedings are now available at

http://www6.bibl.ulaval.ca:8080/etd2006/pages/prog.jsf

Second International Conference on Open Repositories, January 23-26,

2007 in San Antonio, Texas

10th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations**

Uppsala, Sweden, June 13-16, 2007

http://epc.ub.uu.se/etd2007/^

ETD2007 - Added Value for E-theses

This meeting offers scope for an exchange of experience and

consolidation of cooperation in the field of electronic theses and

dissertations at local, national and international levels.

Under the general theme "Added Value for E-theses", ETD 2007 is

organised around two main themes: "Integrating ETDs with institutional

processes and practices" and "Value added services".

The themes of the conference call for reflection on opportunities for

joint efforts among various players in the production and information

chain, both inside and outside our universities.

The Conference Committee invites for the submission of papers and

posters in all areas relevant to Electronic Theses and Dissertations,

including but not limited to:

Important dates:

November 15, 2006 - First call for papers

January 15th, 2007 - Registration opens

February 15th, 2007 - Final deadline for submission of abstracts of

papers and posters

March 15th, 2007 - Notification of acceptance

May, 15th, 2007 - Deadline for final paper submission

June 13-16th, 2007 - ETD Conference 2007

Author guidelines: Instructions for submission will be updated on the

conference website. For early submission, contact: etd2007@ub.uu.se

Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and the

electronic version of the contributions also will be available from the

conference website.

11th International Conference on Electronic Publishing

First Call for Papers - Elpub2007

13 to 15 June 2007, Vienna (Austria)

http://www.elpub.net

Openness in Digital Publishing: Awareness, Discovery and Access

"Openness" is a broad philosophical as well as technical tenet that

underlies much of the innovation in the creation and consumption of

Internet technologies, which are in turn transforming scholarly

communications, practices and publishing across the disciplines and around

the world.

ELPUB 2007 is devoted to examining the full spectrum of "openness" in

digital publishing, from open source applications for content creation to

open distribution of content, and open standards to facilitate sharing and

open access. We welcome papers with theoretical analysis, description of

models and services, or new and innovative technical results on:

• Publishing models, tools, services and roles
• Digital publication value chain
• Multilingual and multimodal interfaces
• Services and technology for specific user communities, media, and content
• Interoperability and scalability
• Middleware infrastructure to facilitate awareness and discovery
• Personalisation technologies (e.g. social tagging, folksonomies, RSS,

• Metadata creation, usage and interoperability
• Semantic web issues
• Security, privacy and copyright issues
• Digital reservation, contents authentication
• Recommendations, guidelines, standards

AUTHOR GUIDELINES:

Contributions are invited for the following categories:

- Single papers (abstract minimum of 1,000 and maximum of 1500 words)

- Tutorial (abstract minimum of 500 and maximum of 1500 words)

- Workshop (abstract max of 1000 words)

- Poster (abstract max of 500 words)

- Demonstration (abstract max of 500 words)

Abstracts must be submitted following the instructions on the conference

website <http://www.elpub.net>.

Important dates:

January 10th 2007: Deadline for submission of abstracts (in all categories):

February 28, 2007: Authors will be notified of the acceptance of submitted

papers and workshop proposal.

April 11th, 2007: Final papers must be received . See website for detailed

author instructions.

Posters (A1-format) and demonstration materials should be brought by their

authors at the conference time. Only abstracts of these contributions will

be published in the conference proceedings. Information on requirements

for Workshops and tutorials proposals will be posted shortly on the

website.

Accepted full paper will be published in the conference proceedings.

Electronic version of the contributions will also be archived at:

http://elpub.scix.net

ABOUT ELPUB

The ELPUB 2007 conference will keep the tradition of the ten previous

international conferences on electronic publishing, held in the United

Kingdom (in 1997 and 2001), Hungary (1998), Sweden (1999), Russia (2000),

the Czech Republic (2002), Portugal (2003), Brazil (2004), Belgium (2005)

and Bulgaria (2006), which is to bring together researchers, lecturers,

librarians, developers, businessmen, entrepreneurs, managers, users and

all those interested on issues regarding electronic publishing in widely

differing contexts. These include the human, cultural, economic, social,

technological, legal, commercial and other relevant aspects that such an

exciting theme encompasses.

Three distinguished features of this conference are: broad scope of topics

which creates a unique atmosphere of active exchange and learning about

various aspects of electronic publishing; combination of general and

technical issues; and a condensed procedure of submission, revision and

publication of proceedings which guarantees presentations of most recent

work.

Conference Location:

Vienna, the capital of Austria, is one of Europe's most fascinating cities

with a rich history and various cultural attractions and reasonable living

costs. The campus of Vienna University of Technology is located near the

historic downtown of Vienna.

Conference Host: Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

General Chair: Bob Martens , Vienna University of

Technology, Vienna, Austria

Programme Chair: Leslie Chan , University of

Toronto at Scarborough, Toronto, Canada

OPEN SCHOLARSHIP 2006: NEW CHALLENGES FOR OPEN ACCESS REPOSITORIES

closes on the 31 August (£150) and the registration fee rises to £180 after

that date.

This inaugural conference will be held at the University of Glasgow,

Scotland, UK on 18-20 October 2006.

Open Scholarship 2006: New Challenges for Open Access Repositories is a

companion European Conference to the OAI meetings at CERN in Geneva, and to

the Nordic Scholarly Communication Conferences, and is aimed at Librarians,

University Administrators, funders, academics and technical specialists.

Key themes will include:

To register and for further information about the conference, including the

programme go to: http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/openscholarship

The conference will also provide an opportunity for posters to be submitted

and displayed in a dedicated slot in the programme. Posters should address

one of the themes of the conference and be no larger than 1m x 1m.

Further details about the poster session, including the list of themes is

available at http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/openscholarship/posters.shtml

The organising committee gratefully acknowledges our sponsors: JISC, LIBER,

SHERPA, SHERPA-LEAP, Ex Libris, SURF, EPrints.org, SPARC Europe, OSI,

Thomson Scientific, Proquest and Biomed Central.

For further information please contact us at openscholarship@lib.gla.ac.uk

We look forward to seeing you in Glasgow in October,

The Organising Committee,

Open Scholarship 2006