SA Research Publishing Report Includes OA Recommendation

A report issued in March by the Academy of Science of South Africa (http://www.assaf.co.za/) entitled Report on a Strategic Approach to Research Publishing in South Africa, which looks at ways to improve the quality and visibility of South African journals, includes a recommendation (#6) dealing with Open Access. This recommendation reads:

"that the Department of Science and Technology 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; and the importance of affordable bandwidth
for research communications for this purpose be drawn to the attention of DST officials
negotiating for better rates."

The complete report can be found at http://blues.sabinet.co.za/images/ejour/assaf/assaf_strategic_research_publishing.pdf.

There's also an article on the report at http://www.scidev.net/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=readnews&itemid=2828&language=1&utm_source=feed-1&utm_medium=rss.