On July 3rd, 2025 the AfricArXiv Open Science Webinar series welcomed attendees to a session on the African Platform for Open Scholarship (APOS). This webinar series is organized by UbuntuNet Alliance and Access2perspectives with support from the African Open Science Platform. This webinar series aims to showcase initiatives that advance open knowledge sharing across the continent through expert presentations and interactive discussion.
The guest speaker was Jill Claassen of UCT Libraries, where she serves as Section Manager for Scholarly Communication and Research. With over twenty years in academic libraries and leadership of the OpenUCT institutional repository and two library presses, Jill brings deep expertise in open publishing models. She is currently pursuing a PhD focused on building a sustainable open access publishing framework for African scholarship.
The agenda began with an introduction to APOS and its mission to amplify African research through diamond open access. Jill outlined how the platform’s tools enable universities and presses to host journals monographs and textbooks without article processing charges. She then described the capacity building services that APOS offers to partner institutions including training in metadata standards open source publishing software and quality assurance workflows.
During the discussion Jill elaborated on real-world use cases and technical integrations. She walked participants through the seamless connection between institutional repositories like OpenUCT and the APOS portal, showed dashboard analytics for tracking downloads and citations, and demonstrated the platform’s multilingual metadata support. Questions from attendees delved into governance models and sustainability strategies, including partnerships with regional consortia to underwrite hosting costs. Several researchers shared early success stories of increased visibility in global indexes and discussed plans for expanding APOS to support new formats such as data sets and conference proceedings.
The open science webinar series continues and is set to feature more gust speakers who will further educate and share their experiences in Open Science. If you missed this session or want to join future webinars please sign up here to receive invitations for upcoming events
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