Research and Output Management in Digital Era: Emerging Challenges at UB

The institutional commitment to research that was hitherto left to individual researchers and few research centres came with the University Strategy, ‘Shape Our Future’. The Strategy, with clear mission and vision of research excellence, provided support for the development of a policy framework, subsequent research, output management infrastructure, and associated processes. This paper has reviewed these developments and emerging challenges posed by resource intensive paper based processes that need to be addressed inline with increasing aspirations for digital scholarship. Efforts to address these challenges are largely to reduce intensity of resource use inline with digital scholarship aspirations that embrace information and communication technology (ICT). However, the dynamism of developments and innovations in ICTs are characterized by high frequency of system obsolesce that could be costly to emerging resource poor Universities, particularly proprietary systems. This leads to the need of embracing the use of open source ware by investing in human resource development for capacity building and sustenance of digital scholarship.