Thirty-two student papers were recognised at the 7th Outstanding Academic Papers by Students (OAPS) awards ceremony at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) on 20 April. OAPS, a joint initiative of the Run Run Shaw Library and CityU’s academic departments, has digitalised 32 papers nominated by 11 CityU departments this year. The papers have been placed in the online CityU Institutional Repository, the OAPS collection.

The project has developed into a partnership with a rising number of premier universities in the US and the Asia-Pacific rim, including in mainland China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand. The OAPS papers can be accessed from the Library Catalogue, the CityU Institutional Repository worldwide, and search engines such as Google Scholar.

At CityU, 241 papers from 339 students affiliated with 14 academic departments in the past seven years have been collected. The OAPS papers are becoming popular and more papers have been cited.

The OAPS project strives to promote scholarly communication and intellectual exchange across disciplines, regions and even culture, by providing students with a quality platform to share their work. More importantly, it nurtures a sense of academic integrity and multicultural sensitivity through peer learning where excellent papers from member institutions are shared through the OAPS portal.

“OAPS encourages scholarly training by teaching staff and peer learning among students, which in turn gives students the opportunity to learn from role models in their academic areas. This prepares them to be competent scholars and professionals after graduation.” said Professor Gary Feng Gang, Associate Provost of CityU, in his welcoming address at the ceremony.

In his congratulatory remarks, Professor Masaru Kono, Faculty of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University, advised awardees to follow their interests and make sure that they are flexible when they enter the world of work.

Dr Anu Vedantham, Director of the Weigle Information Commons, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, coordinated two sharing sessions during the ceremony at which the award-winning students shared their research experience and their recommendations for writing good papers.