March 21, 2023 – Cape Town
The South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC) announced today the signing of a three-year transformational agreement with Oxford University Press (OUP) (2023-2025). The agreement combines read and publish services in the majority of OUP journals in a single agreement for participating SANLiC institutions.
“Oxford University Press is an important publishing venue for our researchers and this agreement enables them to publish fully open access in journals where they previously could generally not afford to do so. This is a most significant advance on prior agreements which were limited to read access to these information resources only,” said Ms Ellen Tise, Chairperson of the SANLiC Board of Directors. “This agreement enables our member institutions to repurpose subscription expenditure to finance Open Access publishing and to significantly enhance the research and learning capabilities of South African institutions.”
Before this agreement, only a tenth of South Africa’s research output in the Oxford collection of 360 hybrid subscription journals were published open access due to affordability. Thanks to this agreement, South African researchers from participating institutions can now publish all of their research fully open access in Oxford hybrid journals without any author facing charges and in 100 Oxford fully open access journals with a 10% discount on the article processing charges.
This cost-neutral agreement enables participating institutions to repurpose subscription expenditure to finance the cost of open access publishing in hybrid journals on behalf of their researchers. In so doing the agreement enables a flip of an estimated 2% of annual South African research from behind the paywall to open access, making it more visible and discoverable. Given that research published in open access enjoys far more usage and citations than in the subscription publishing model, the benefits for the advancement and distribution of South African scholarship are spectacular.
The agreement ensures no disruption for authors to the normal article submission workflow for hybrid journals.
Click here to find out more about participating institutions and the list of OUP journals. Click here to read more about OUP’s read and publish offering and agreements.
Ms Ellen Tise
Chairperson
SANLiC Board of Directors
Media Contact:
Glenn Truran (SANLiC) – Click here to email.