From February 11 to 13, 2026, Dr Lighton Phiri facilitated a three-day Institutional Repository and Open Access Publishing Training Workshop at Kapasa Makasa University (KMU) in Chinsali. The workshop prepared KMU staff to run the university's institutional repository and its multidisciplinary journal, so that research produced at KMU is openly available and easier to find online.
Day 1: the scholarly publishing landscape
The opening presentation, Electronic Journal Publishing Using Open Journal Systems and DSpace, looked at how visible Zambian scholarly output is online and why institutional repositories and open access journals matter for the ranking and visibility of a university's research. It introduced the features and requirements of Open Journal Systems (OJS), the cost implications of running journals and repositories, and the scholarly publishing infrastructure behind them. The day closed with the configuration of the KMU repository, including how its communities and collections are organised in DSpace.
Day 2: using the KMU Institutional Repository
The second day was hands-on training on the KMU Institutional Repository: an overview of the repository, user profiles and roles, the content ingestion workflow, and batch ingestion of existing research outputs using the Simple Archive Format (SAF).
Day 3: the KMU Multidisciplinary Journal
The final day focused on the KMU Multidisciplinary Journal on OJS, working through the submission, review, copyediting and production workflows, and closed with a discussion of the way forward for the repository and the journal.
