The workshops cover the following modules:

1) Overview of publishing in South Africa

This module provides an overview of the South African publishing industry. It examines various sectors that comprise the book publishing industry, namely school book publishing, academic publishing, trade publishing and scholarly publishing.

2) Overview of scholarly publishing in South Africa

This module provides an overview of the scholarly publishing terrain in South Africa. It examines issues such as, what is scholarly publishing? What are scholarly outputs? Who are the scholarly publishers in South Africa? What are the challenges facing scholarly publishing in South Africa? It introduces participants to an interesting field of the publishing industry and they leave with a good knowledge of where exactly to send their research outputs once completed.

3) Overview of specifications of journal articles

This module introduces participants to the world of journal article writing and publishing. It is impressed on participants that before they can start writing a journal article, they need to identify a journal to which they would like to submit their article. Once they have chosen the journal, they then need to familiarise themselves with the specifications of that journal such as extent/length of the article, referencing style, the number of words in the abstract etc. Participants are made aware that journal editors do reject articles if they do not adhere to the specifications of their journals even though the quality of the scholarship might be good.

4) A comparative analysis of theoretical journal articles vis-à-vis fieldwork based journal articles

This module presents an overview of the similarities and differences between journal articles based on existing literature or what is commonly referred to as desktop research and those based on fieldwork/empirical research.

5) A comparative analysis of book chapters vis-à-vis journal articles

This module presents an overview of the similarities and differences between scholarly book chapters and journal articles.

6) Overview of conference proceedings

This module introduces participants to how conference proceedings are initially cocnceptualised through a ‘call for papers’, submission of abstracts, submission of draft papers, presentation of papers at conferences, further updates after the conference, final submissions, peer-review process and final publication of the proceedings through hard copies, electronic versions or online.

7) Getting started and choosing a relevant journal for your article

This module introduces participants on how to identify a journal to which they wish to submit their article after completion. Participants are further introduced to how to determine whether their article would be relevant for local, national, regional, continental or international journals.

8) Overview of South African journals

This module introduces participants to various South African journals in their respective fields. It also introduces them to all the South African journals that are accredited by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET).

9) The peer-review and publishing process

This module introduces participants to the important process in scholarly publishing, namely, the peer-review and publishing processes. Participants are made aware of how scholarly publishers conduct the peer-review process and the guidelines that publishers supply to peer-reviewers to guide them in the review process. The module clearly shows participants what it is that the peer-reviewers will be examining when they will be reviewing their articles. Finally, participants are taken through the publishing process of journal articles.

10) The finances of publishing

This module introduces participants to the finances of publishing. Participants are made aware that the publishing of books is a business enterprise and therefore the saleability of books influences whether publishers will publish their books or not. Participants are shown in a practical manner the costs involved in the publication of journals as well as that of books.

11) The publishing value chain

This module introduces the participants to the value chain in scholarly publishing. It explores the relationship between authors, publishers, libraries, and booksellers as well as to how a book/journal article starts as an idea, into a manuscript that gets submitted to a publisher who in turn publishes such as an article or a book, which then gets delivered to a library/bookshop where upon readers then access it.

12) Overview of open access predatory journals publishing

This module introduces the participants to an ever-growing field of what has come to be referred to as ‘predatory’ journal publishing. Over the past decade a group of scholarly journals have proliferated that have become known as ‘predatory journals’ and produced by ‘predatory publishers’. ‘Identifying predatory or pseudo-journal’. Biochemia Medica 2017; 27 (2): 285-91. ‘Predatory’ refers to the fact that these entities prey on academicians for financial profit via article processing charges for open access articles, without meeting scholarly publishing standards such as peer-review. Although predatory journals may claim to conduct peer-review and mimic the structure of legitimate journals, they publish all or most submitted material without external peer review and do not follow standard policies advocated by industry bodies. Simply put, predatory journals are fraudulent journals that masquerade as the real deal while their actual aim is simply to make profits. They thrive because they feast on a system that has made publications record central in academy. It is imperative that academics are able to identify ‘predatory’ journals from ‘legitimate’ journals.