ROER4D project activity toolkit: Curation and dissemination

projectactivitytoolkit

The ROER4D project activity toolkit is comprised of five documents outlining activities associated with each of the University of Cape Town Network Hub pillars of project management activity: networking, evaluation, communications, research capacity development, and curation and dissemination. It is hoped that these chapters will be of practical use to other projects attempting to integrate any of these aspects in their day-to-day activities.

Curation and Dissemination” is the third in a series of five project activity toolkit chapters. Written by Michelle Willmers and Thomas King, it discusses the processes entailed in ROER4D’s curation and dissemination (C&D) activity which supported all aspects of the project, facilitating curation and secure storage of project materials and outputs, findability of content (both internally and externally) and the promotion of intra-project collaboration. It was also a key supporting activity in the project ambition to establish an empirical baseline of OER research from the Global South.

The brief outlines the project’s strategic approach in terms of positioning itself as publisher in the context of an open research framework, highlighting the workflows and processes associated with two key aspects of its C&D activity: publication of a peer-reviewed edited volume, Adoption and Impact of OER in the Global South, and the articulation and implementation of the project’s open data initiative.

The key insights from C&D activity were that, despite a desire to share ROER4D work as openly and as soon as possible, the model ultimately adopted by the project was guided by the principle of doing no harm and ensuring that the interests of researchers and authors always came first. This meant that content was not always released as rapidly or as openly as originally envisioned, but rather according to a more measured, strategic approach aimed at boosting rigour and building researcher confidence. Moreover, the project’s C&D model did not replace traditional systems of quality assurance and publication, but rather made a start at innovating a new approach to curation and publication in which the project is a central, coordinating entity where dissemination mechanisms can develop in an agile, iterative fashion as the project context evolves.

To access the ROER4D edited volume, visit: /edited-volume-2.

To access the project open data collection, visit: https://www.datafirst.uct.ac.za/dataportal/index.php/catalog/ROER4D.

You may also like...

Navigation
×