4.8.2. Collaboration and Partnerships

4.8.2. Collaboration and Partnerships The University has a number of academic cooperation agreements with universities and agencies around the world. These are too many to list, but in short, we have 75 active agreements in Africa, 111 in Europe, 58 in Asia, 69 in North America and 8 in South America. These vary in nature from simple staff and student mobility agreements, to joint degrees and use of specialised equipment. We have identified some of these as being strategic and as such are dedicating more resources to this handful of partnerships. These partners are University College London (UCL), Ryerson University (from Canada), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT from the USA), University of Edinburgh (from Scotland), Vanderbilt University (from the USA) and the Universities of Limpopo and Venda (from South Africa). Most of our mobility agreements are with universities in Europe, as the European Union is a generous funder of these. In 2020, this activity was drastically curtailed because of the Covid-19 pandemic. We had a number of our staff and students in Europe and Asia in the first quarter of the year and had to scramble to get them back home before the international ban on travel came into effect. In reality, we had a number of them that could not return before the ban was imposed. We worked with a number of embassies both locally and in internationally to ensure that each of them was returned home safely.

During 2020, the total number of publications attributed to Wits authors by Scopus was 3 567 (as compared to 3 170 in 2019). Many of these involved joint publications with authors from other universities. The graph below provides the affiliation of these authors from the TOP 15 countries/regions.

The regional breakdowns are as follows: