OpenUCT is the open access institutional repository of the University of Cape Town (UCT). It preserves and makes UCT scholarly outputs digitally and freely available, including theses and dissertations, journal articles, book chapters, technical and research reports, as well as open educational resources.
The repository was launched in July 2014 and has been developed in line with international interoperability and Dublin Core metadata standards using DSpace open source software. OpenUCT is indexed by all major search engines.
UCT first expressed its commitment to openness in April 2008 when it signed the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education. This commitment was further strengthened in November 2011 when UCT signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. The mechanism to share the knowledge produced at UCT became a reality when Council adopted an Open Access Policy in March 2014.
The OpenUCT repository was developed as part of the broader OpenUCT Initiative, a project funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation.
OpenUCT is governed by UCT’s Open Access Policy to determine what can and cannot be added to the Repository.
For more information about UCT’s institutional repository, OpenUCT, browse through the below FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Students submit their theses/dissertations on PeopleSoft. Approximately two weeks after conferment of degree, theses/dissertations are migrated from PeopleSoft to the library’s workflow for processing. It takes approximately a further four weeks for all theses/dissertations to be processed and publicly available on OpenUCT.
OpenUCT uses
UCT’s Open Access Policy as a guide to determine what can be added to the Repository.
The UCT open access policy indicates that UCT authors can add on OpenUCT:
OpenUCT uses
UCT's Open Access Policy as a guide to determine what can be added to the Repository.
Items that will not be added to OpenUCT are:
- Preprints, also known as author manuscript; and
- Annual Reports and institutional administrative material.
If you are uncertain about what should be added to OpenUCT, contact the OpenUCT office for assistance: OpenUCT@uct.ac.za.
The repository, OpenUCT, is intended to be a showcase of research undertaken at UCT by UCT authors during the time that they were associated with the University. We recommend that scholarly works produced before having an affiliation with UCT be deposited in the repositories of the institutions of previous affiliation.
OpenUCT allocates a unique persistent identifier that is discoverable by major search engines like Google. This means that more people will have access to the article and an increased number of readers can convert into an increased number of citations.
Students submit theses/dissertations on PeopleSoft, a platform overseen by the Registrar's office. After conferment of degree, theses/dissertations get migrated from PeopleSoft to the library workflow for processing and upload to OpenUCT. Therefore students cannot directly submit their theses and dissertations on OpenUCT. Theses and Dissertation are an exception to the self archiving requirements of the open access policy.
OpenUCT is a repository for published works. UCT has a data repository called
ZivaHub and the UCT community can share their data on
ZivaHub.
Authors of research papers generated from research either fully or partially funded by NRF, when submitting and publishing in academic journals, should deposit their final peer-reviewed manuscripts that have been accepted by the journals, to the administering Institution’s Repository (at UCT, the repository is OpenUCT) with an embargo period of no more than 12 months. Earlier Open Access may be provided should this be allowed by the publisher. If the paper is published in an Open Access journal or the publisher allows the deposit of the published version in PDF format, such version should be deposited into the administering Institutional Repository and Open Access should be provided as soon as possible.
All OpenUCT FAQs
