University of Cape Town (UCT)
UCT is both host and a study site in the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programe. The SCAP research team is based in the Centre for Educational Technology, a department in UCT’s Centre for Higher Education Development, with SCAP Programme Director Eve Gray also being an Associate in the Intellectual Property Law & Policy Research Unit (Law Faculty), where she brokers a dialogue between SCAP programme issues and concerns and the broad IP environment in which the programme operates. Collaboration with the Southern African Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) in the Commerce Faculty as a study site and strategic interaction with the UCT Research Office as well as Information and Communication Technology Services (ICTS) provides the programme with a broad, cross-disciplinary institutional base. Also significant is the SCAP partnership with the recently launched OpenUCT initiative in promoting a strategic approach to scholarly communication within the institution.
Study Site:
SALDRU
The Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) carries out research in applied empirical microeconomics with an emphasis on labour markets, human capital, poverty, inequality and social policy. We strive for academic excellence and policy relevance. SALDRU has implemented a range of innovative surveys in South Africa since it was founded in 1975, and is based in the School of Economics in the University of Cape Town. We have three permanent research staff, and twenty two Research Associates who share common research interests, and are drawn from the UCT School of Economics, as well as other South African and international universities. Given the size of the institution and its role as project host, two research coordinators head up SCAP activity here.
Research Team:
Eve Gray – Programme Lead
Eve Gray is a publisher, publishing strategy consultant and researcher specialising in the application of digital media and new strategic and business models to scholarly communications and knowledge transfer in the developing world and particularly in Africa. She is an Honorary Research Associate in the Centre for Educational Technology at UCT and has extensive experience in scholarly and academic textbook publishing in Europe and South Africa. A former Director of Wits University Press and UCT Press as well as Academic Publishing Director at Juta Publishers.
Michelle Willmers – Programme Manager
Michelle Willmers has an interest in new technologies and platforms for an expanded, open approach towards scholarly communication, with a special focus on African universities. She has a background in academic and scholarly publishing and has worked as a consultant and project manager on numerous online scholarly publishing research projects. She has extensive experience as a Publishing Manager in the journal publishing arena and has worked in the field of open access and open educational resources. Michelle is a writer, editor, researcher and publisher and was recently a senior team member in UCT's Shuttleworth-funded Open Educational Resources project.
Catherine Kell - Research Lead
Dr Catherine Kell is the Research Lead for the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme. Catherine holds a PhD in Language in Education from the Open University in the United Kingdom, and an MPhil in Adult Education from the University of Cape Town. Previous positions include lecturing in the Education Department at UCT and at the University of Waikato in New Zealand; Learning Designer at the Centre for Academic Development at the University of Auckland; and, most recently, Learning and Communications Manager for the Twaweza Initiative in East Africa. In the 1980s she worked at the Centre for African Studies at UCT on experiments in making university research available and accessible to the community. Her earlier research focused on the relation between ethnography and policy in adult literacy in South Africa. Her current work on literacy brings the New Literacy Studies approach together with interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography and activity theory, to develop an approach to the study of literacy called 'transcontextual analysis'.
Henry Trotter – Researcher
Henry Trotter holds two Master's degrees in African Studies and History from Yale University and is currently working on his PhD concerning South African "port culture" at Yale. He has researched and published extensively on seafaring, dockside prostitution and apartheid-era forced removals. He recently concluded working as an education researcher in South Africa's parliament and now looks forward to contributing to SCAP by exploring the values system and costing models associated with alternative approaches to scholarly communication.
Thomas Bossuroy - Research Coordinator (SALDRU)
Dr Thomas Bossuroy is a Research and Policy Fellow at SALDRU. He has served as a consultant in macroeconomics of West-African countries and his research interests include inequalities and social mobility, political economy, social structures and identities, and evaluation of public policy.
Lighton Phiri - Content Architect
Lighton Phiri completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Zambia. He is currently studying for an M.Sc. in the Digital Libraries Laboratory of the Computer Science Department at the University of Cape Town, where he is conducting research on simplifying the development of repository software tools.
Thomas King – Research Assistant
Thomas King has a BA in Anthropology from Rhodes University and completed his Honours studies with an original thesis on school-based development projects in underprivileged areas in Grahamstown. He has worked in the NGO sector in Cape Town, providing child-based leadership facilitation, and is a researcher for an NGO advocating increased visibility and targeted treatment for head-trauma victims.
François van Schalkwyk - Consultant
François van Schalkwyk is an independent researcher and consultant in the fields of publishing and higher education studies. He holds an MPhil in Publishing Studies from Stirling University (UK) and an MEd from the University of the Western Cape (South Africa). He is currently involved the Higher Education Research and Advocacy Network in Africa (HERANA) project of the Centre for Higher Education Transformation (CHET) which is building on existing research on the contribution of university research projects to economic development in eight African universities. In addition to his academic interests, he is the managing director of COMPRESS.dsl, a publishing company based in Cape Town, South Africa.
