The Scholarly Publishing Unit takes responsibility for ensuring that Open Access initiatives are promoted to enhance the visibility of all South African research articles and to make them accessible to the entire international research community. Specifically:

• Online, open access ( “Gold route”) versions of South African research journals should be funded in significant part through a per-article charge system (linked in the case of higher education institutions to an agreed fraction of output publication subsidies, and in the case of other research-producing institutions to adapted budgeting practice), but publishers should still sell subscriptions to print copies and should maximise other sources of income to lower the article-charge burden.
• A federation of institutional Open Access repositories, adhering to common standards, should be established (“Green route”), with resources made available to help institutions in the preliminary stage, this virtual repository to be augmented by a central repository for those institutions which are unable to run a sustainable repository.
• National harvesting of South African open access repositories should be undertaken as a matter of urgency, preferably by the NRF.
• The importance of affordable bandwidth for research communications for this purpose be drawn to the attention of DST officials negotiating for better rates.

Click here to go to the SciELO SA website.