This presentation explores Open Research at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in South Africa. The paper outlines how the Research Data Management (RDM) site, managed by the UJ Library has become an active site for research data storage, but the challenges faced in encouraging researchers to use open research stored on the site. The paper is divided into two sections. The first examines the process of encouraging researchers to upload, catalogue and share their data sets on the RDM site. This discussion looks at the practice at UJ and compares it to the experience of 10 other libraries in South Africa who have RDM sites. The data for this section was collected through an online survey. The second part of the paper discusses the researcher sentiments about using research data sets on the RDM site for their own research. This section is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews conducted with 10 academics who have datasets hosted on the site and 10 who do not have datasets hosted on the site. The findings of this section point out the challenges and concerns researchers have about using open data on the RDM site. The paper concludes by outlining the work that librarians and the research officers have to do to help researchers understand how to use open data effectively.
Open Zoom
