The South African Journal of Science (SAJS) is one of the first South African journals to be hosted on the fully Open Access platform, SciELO South Africa. This represents a major achievement in South Africa that will benefit researchers and scholars in providing a free-to-publish, free-to-access platform for the best scientific thinking the country has to offer.

SciELO focuses on developing countries where few end users have access to traditional peer-reviewed academic journals either online or in print form. Access to journals is subscription-based and can be very expensive. Only certain libraries carry them, meaning that there have been severe restrictions in accessibility and affordability up to this point. The Open Access platform for these journals aims to combat these restrictions, while simultaneously enhancing the international visibility of South African research.

Open Access publishing allows research literature comprising academic peer-reviewed journals, conference papers and theses to be placed in an online portal from which they can be downloaded for use. The authors do not have to pay any type of publishing fee. However, it is important to realise that open access by no means equates to ‘self-publishing’ – all articles conform to the traditional process of journal publishing, entailing critical reading by several peer-reviewers who ensure that a rigorous standard of research is upheld. Open Access publishing merely makes these research results available and affordable to a wider audience.

The South African Journal of Science, published by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), is the first of a number of leading existing peer-reviewed journals to be fully Open Access on the SciELO platform. Other scientific journals which are in the process of being uploaded are Koedoe, the South African Journal of Education, and HTS: Theological Studies.

Journals selected to be part of SciELO South Africa must first go through a rigorous process of quality appraisal, in which journal accreditation by the Department of Education is considered, along with IBSS and ISI rankings and peer-reviewing processes. This will ensure that the most reliable, credible and innovative research by South Africa’s top researchers will be available in full to any person with internet access and the desire to learn, at no cost. Actual usage by scholars and scientists is monitored by the indexing system in various ways, including journal impact factors, and article citation and download statistics.

The initiative is led by Susan Veldsman, a specialist in the field of Open Access and Director of the Scholarly Publishing Unit at the ASSAf. She has been working in the information science sector for over twenty years, with a recent focus on Open Access journals.

The implementation of this open and freely accessible online journal platform has been pioneered by the Scientific Electronic Online Library (SciELO) project, based in Brazil. Fully indexed, it has been successfully implemented in eight countries, mostly in Latin America, with others being in the developmental phases. SciELO South Africa is the first site of this growing system on the African continent.

 Visit www.scielo.org.za.