UCT Press joins the Open Book Collective
flavoursofopenscience's bookmarks 2026-07-16
Summary:
The Open Book Collective is delighted to welcome UCT Press, one of the University of Cape Town’s scholarly publishing arms, as its latest Publisher Member, a joining that marks a significant moment in the OBC’s ongoing commitment to supporting open access scholarship beyond the Global North.
Based in Cape Town, South Africa, UCT Press has been publishing peer-reviewed academic scholarship for over 30 years, with a catalogue that focuses on the promotion and dissemination of original scholarly from and about Africa. Historically, its strength has been in the humanities and social sciences but it is diversifying to include other fields. Its ultimate, ambitious goal is to become the preferred university press for academic authors across the continent, providing a platform for historically marginalised scholarship, and contributing to the decolonisation of academic publishing in practice, rather than merely in principle.
By joining the OBC, UCT Press takes a significant step in its transition toward a fully Diamond Open Access model. Membership of the OBC will enable the press to extend open access publication to researchers beyond UCT’s own institutional funding, develop in-house capacity, and strengthen its metadata infrastructure. UCT Press also has immediate plans to expand its publishing into diverse languages, reflecting its commitment to linguistic inclusion as well as geographic reach.
UCT Press joins the OBC in the University Presses package, adding its voice to a collective that already includes African Minds as a Cape Town-based publisher committed to African scholarly perspectives. Together, these memberships signal that the OBC’s model of Diamond Open Access, collective funded, and governance in the interests of scholarship rather than commerce, resonates with publishers working across very different institutional and geographic contexts.
The OBC now counts 22 Publisher and Service Provider Members, spanning ten countries and publishing across multiple languages and disciplines.