The use and perceptions of open Access resources by legal academics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa

Authors

  • Elizabeth Moll-Willard University of Cape Town Libraries

Abstract

Although access to primary legal materials in South Africa is now easily accessible as a result of the Free Access to Law movement, access to legal scholarship is not as easy. Through using the University of Cape Town (UCT) as a case study, due to its research intensive nature, it is possible to see how academics are publishing their legal scholarship through the use of bibliometrics and data mining. After the success of a Research Visibility month, law librarians were able to attest to the perceptions of legal academics around the importance of the openness and visibility of their research. The author contrasts these two to see if the perception of legal academics around the visibility of their resources reflects their publishing practices. It is seen that although academics at UCT publish mostly in closed journals, the publishing in open and hybrid journals has slowly increased during the period 2011-2015. Further it is evidenced that legal academics are exploring other avenues, including that of self-archiving, to boost the visibility of their work. Law Librarians are able to assist in boosting at least the visibility, if not the openness of legal academics’ work.

Downloads

Published

2018-09-26

Issue

Vol. 6 No. 1 (2018)

Section

Free and open access to legal information in the digital age

License

Copyright Agreement with Authors

Authors submitting a paper to JOAL automatically agree to confer a limited license to JOAL if and when the manuscript is accepted for publication. This license allows JOAL to publish a manuscript in a given issue, by any means, anywhere in the world. Authors whose submissions have been accepted then have a choice of:

  1. Dedicating the article to the public domain. This allows anyone to make any use of the article at any time, including commercial use. A good way to do this is to use the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication Web form; see http://creativecommons.org/license/publicdomain-2?lang=en.
  2. Retaining some rights while allowing some use. For example, authors may decide to disallow commercial use without permission. Authors may also decide whether to allow users to make modifications (e.g.translations, adaptations) without permission. A good way to make these choices is to use a Creative Commons license.
    • Go to http://creativecommons.org/license/.
    • Choose and select license. Choose "generic" if you are in the U.S. and "text" for JOAL articles.
    • What to do next — you can then e–mail the license html code to yourself. Do this, and then forward that e–mail to JOAL’s editors. Put your name in the subject line of the e–mail with your name and article title in the e–mail.
    Background information about Creative Commons licenses can be found at http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/.
  3. Retaining full rights, including translation and reproduction rights. Authors may use the statement:  © Author 2013 All Rights Reserved. Authors may choose to use their own wording to reserve copyright. If you choose to retain full copyright, please add your copyright statement to the end of the article.