In recent years, Open Access has grown in South Africa. However, there remain some major obstacles to overcome, including the lack of a national policy. Inspired by the international initiative OA2020, various scientific and educational organisations in South Africa are coming together to build a path to Open Access.

We outline the history of South Africa’s mandates and its current policies for those looking to submit research or read it.

Open Access is the new paradigm

Open Access refers to a publishing model for scholarly research that makes information immediately available to readers at no cost. This research is also free to reuse for scholarly purposes.

The benefits of publishing Open Access include gaining more citations and a greater impact, reaching a wider audience, advancing scientific innovation, retaining copyrights, and increasing the potential for collaboration and recognition. Open Access can also help institutions like universities and research agencies in low- and middle-income countries by removing any price barriers to accessing academic research.

History of Open Access in South Africa

There have been a range of open science initiatives over the last 20 years. Here is a brief history of Open Access in South Africa:

• 2009: South Africa joined the SciELO Program, which provided an Open Access searchable full-text database.
• 2010: The Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) initiated a study looking at subscription payments and artificial processing charges at a national level.
• 2012: The Berlin 10 Open Access Conference is held by Stellenbosch University. The conference focused on removing financial barriers that limit access.
• 2013: The South Africa SciELO database became an independent national collection.
• 2015: The National Research Foundation (NRF) mandated that authors receiving funding should deposit their work in an institutional repository with an embargo period of 12 months.
• 2016: The Dakar Declaration on Open Science in Africa called for urgent action by institutions and governments to advance science in Africa.
• 2017: The African Open Science Platform (AOSP) is launched. This is a multi-institutional initiative providing tools and concepts for practising open science.
• 2018: Universities South Africa (USAf) meet to align universities with the OA2020 Project.
• 2019: The Department of Science and Innovation publish a White Paper that places science, technology, and innovation at the top of the country’s agenda. Open Access represents a small but very important part of this.
• 2024: Open Science in the South 2024 is co-hosted by the NRF in Cape Town. The event surveyed the publishing practices of African scientists and the publishing ecosystem in Africa.

Various initiatives in South Africa have established key infrastructure and tools to support Open Access. Most notably, SciELO provides a database of OA journals that is free to access. Furthermore, there is desire, as seen in the Dakar Declaration and White Paper, for open science to be advanced in South Africa.

Current Open Access laws in South Africa

South Africa has an inequitable higher education and science system, with large disparities amongst institutions. Alongside this, the country is being impacted by the sharply increasing prices of journal subscriptions.

Despite the slow support for OA from the government, there has been key developments. The main emphasis over the last 20 years has been on developing institutional- and national-level repositories and OA journals. These are integrated into the SciELO platform.

In 2015, the NRF, a government-mandated research and science development agency, required that:

[Authors receiving funding] should deposit their final peer-reviewed manuscripts that have been accepted by the journals, to the administering Institution Repository with an embargo period of no more than 12 months.

And that any data supporting the research should be deposited in an accredited OA repository.

Accordingly, there are many institutional repositories in the country. For example,

• Stellenbosch University: SUNScholar.
• University of Cape Town, OpenUCT.
• University of Kwazulu-Natal, DSpace.
• University of Pretoria: UPSpace.
• University of the Witwatersrand, WIReDSpace.

License agreements

The South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC) is the country’s leading facilitator of access to high-quality scholarly electronic information.

The SANLiC’s draft open science policy intends to make OA mandatory for publications arising from publicly funded research and ultimately for research from all sources of funding. The guiding principle of the policy is “as open as possible, as closed as necessary”.

The Consortium actively negotiates collective license agreements with publishers and aggregators, therefore enhancing access to information and the sharing of resources.

International initiatives

In 2018, USAf met to associate universities with OA2020, which is an international initiative aiming to accelerate the transition to OA by aligning organisations and institutions and providing support. The vision of the initiative is “for an open, financially sustainable and globally equitable scholarly publishing system”; the mission describes how

The subscription paywall system propagates disparities. By repurposing their former subscription investments to support open access publishing, libraries and research institutions around the world are reducing disparities, enabling free and universal access to new knowledge for researchers everywhere.

South African signees include:

• Central University of Technology, Free State.
• National School of Government.
• South African National Library and Information Consortium.
• The Da Vinci Institute For Technology Management.
• University of the Free State.
• University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Furthermore, there are three leading continent-wide initiatives that aim to support African researchers and open science.

African Journals Online launched in 1998 and is an online collection of African scholarly journals. The platform also provides journal publishing practices and standards and technical training services. It is South Africa-based and specifically supports and encourages (but does not require) Open Access models.

The African Open Science Platform (AOSP) is a multi-institutional and multidimensional initiative that aims to provide African scientists with the necessary tools and concepts for practising open science. It provides the means to find, deposit, manage, share, and reuse data, software, and metadata and serves as a community hub, amongst many other things.

AfricArXiv is a pan-African Open Access portal. It is community led and serves as a digital archive for diverse African research items.

South Africa’s Open Access statistics

South Africa produces around 1% of the global outputs of journal articles. This makes it a global player in scholarly research, albeit a smaller one. From 2014 to 2019, 66% of South Africa’s research was published as subscription-only. However, according to Dimensions data for 2023, around 67% of articles in South Africa were published as OA.

National efforts have increased the country’s research output and its level of postgraduate education. Alongside this, various organisations across the country are mutually advocating for OA, so it is likely the share of subscription-only articles will shift through the 2020s.

This is further likely due to the success of OA articles in South Africa. To elaborate, a SciELO study found that OA publications in South Africa gain more citations, aligning with the global Open Access citation advantage trend. The study found that “on average, one output received five times the citations because it was accessible”.

Future trends

In 2023, USAf presented a briefing document on South Africa’s journey to OA.

The document outlines how there is currently deeply unequal access to scholarly journals and information databases. In it, ASSAf, and other leading South African institutions, pledge to ensure access to journals and other information for all South African scholars and students. It also expresses support for OA2020.

It outlines the next steps as the following:

• Convening meetings of academics, librarians, and research managers;
• Maintaining and building the relationship with OA2020;
• Data collection and analysis on publishing models;
• Moving from an institutional to a national approach;
• Developing a national roadmap to OA.

Overall, the document represents a turning point in Open Access in South Africa, aligning with the 2019 White Paper and OA2020. It seems that the country’s various organisations are beginning to align not only in values but also in their practical approach.

It is likely that the country will finally implement some kind of national OA policy in the coming years, inspired by OA2020.

Value of Open Access

All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an Open Access license. This means:

• Everyone has free and unlimited access to the full text of all articles published in MDPI journals;
• Everyone is free to re-use the published material if proper accreditation/citation of the original publication is given;
• Open Access publication is supported by the authors’ institutes or research funding agencies by payment of a comparatively low Article Processing Charge (APC) for accepted articles.

Researchers can satisfy South Africa’s developing Open Access policy and pre-empt any stricter legislation by publishing in an MDPI journal. Alternatively, if you want to publish an early version of your article, try Preprints, our service for publishing early versions of research that are not peer-reviewed and report on either ongoing or complete research.

Open Access makes vital information accessible to all readers and researchers and brings together scholars from across the world. Thus, it is ideal for tackling global challenges such as climate change and cancer research that require urgent and coordinated attention.

South Africa’s leading scientific organisations are coming together to build a path to Open Access. Click here if you would also like to learn more about Open Access around the world.