Open Access in higher education in South Africa - ITWeb Africa

"According to the Global Open Access Portal, the OA movement in Africa has recently gained momentum. In 2015, the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) issued a statement that encouraged higher education institutions to formulate policies on providing OA to research publications funded by the NRF. In the same year, OA policies from Kenya, Zimbabwe, Algeria, South Africa, Ghana and Nigeria were registered in the Registry of Open Access Repository Policies and Mandates (ROARMAP), and more than 125 OA digital repositories were registered in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR).

Although many universities in South Africa have been committed to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access in the Sciences and Humanities since 2012, Dr Leti Kleyn, Manager: Open Scholarship and Digitisation Programmes at the University of Pretoria, at the Apereo Africa 2017 conference, gave another passionate call for more openness at universities in South Africa. This will, amongst many other benefits, increase transparency and quality of research by speeding up the transfer of knowledge, improve efficiency in science, and address subsequent global challenges more effectively. Most importantly, as demonstrated by the Homo Naledi research outputs on mainstream TV news channels, Facebook and other social media: Not only the closed academic communities who can afford to pay lots of money for published articles will have access to scholarly articles - ordinary citizens can also become involved. OA will allow all Internet readers anywhere in the world, to link, read, download, store, print, use and mine the digital content of the articles with limited copy and licence restrictions.?