IOP Publishing and SANLiC partner to minimise OA publishing barriers in South Africa

15 May 2023 by Faye Holst

South African researchers to benefit from IOP Publishing OA agreement for the first time. 

IOP Publishing, and the South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC) have finalised a three-year transformative agreement as they work towards breaking down open access (OA) publishing barriers for researchers in the global south. The agreement, which is IOP Publishing’s first in South Africa, enables researchers at participating member institutions to publish their research openly with no costs at the point of submission. The agreement also provides reading access to IOP Publishing’s entire journal portfolio and most of its partner journals.   

“SANLiC share our commitment to opening up research and addressing inequalities in publishing. Our partnership will simplify OA publishing, ensure that cost is not a barrier and enhance the sharing of African scholarly output with the global scientific community. A sector-wide shift towards OA has truly begun in Europe, the US, Asia and Africa where agreements such as this are helping to drive this transition.”   

Julian Wilson, Chief Sales Officer at IOP Publishing

Transformative agreements stimulate uptake in OA publishing by making it the default choice when articles are submitted. Broader access to research is key to accelerating scientific discovery: IOP Publishing data shows that content published OA is downloaded 80% more than paywalled content and cited 30% more, demonstrating the substantial benefits of publishing OA.  

This agreement adds to IOP Publishing’s rapidly expanding portfolio of ‘read and publish’ agreements which now consists of more than 900 institutions in 33 countries.