The Library and Information Service has signed agreements with a number of publishers that make it easier for SU researchers to publish open access (OA) with these publishers, and in some cases to even publish OA without paying any article processing charge (APC). Many of these agreements have been negotiated by the South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC), of which Stellenbosch University is a member.
What is Open access?
By 'open access' to the literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself."
Budapest Open Access Initiative Definitions of open access
The three original, formal definitions of open access are to be found in the founding conventions, namely the Budapest (2002), Bethesda (2003) and Berlin (2003) definitions. A fourth major statement is the updated Budapest BOAI10 Recommendations
Open Access Publication Fund closed
Regrettably, the Library's fund in support of open access publication (OAP) funding has ceased to exist in April 2021.
The Library had some funds available to support OAP author fees in 2021. However, due to the number of applications received, this amount has been spent and no further funding will be available in future/as from 1 April 2021. We therefore request that researchers do not submit any further OAP funding applications to the Library.
The Library will continue to administer the University’s deposit account with SpringerNature (formerly BioMed Central), which will allow SU researchers to submit open access articles to SpringerNature without having to pay author fees to SpringerNature before publication, at https://preview.springernature.com/gp/open-research/institutional-agreements/individual-institutional-agreements. Submissions under the University’s deposit account will afford researchers 15% discount on the article processing charge (APC) for some SpringerNature titles. However, in future researchers will have to refund the Library 100% of these author fees, plus 15% VAT, upon publication. By submitting an article to SpringerNature against the University’s deposit account, a researcher agrees to refunding the full cost to the Library after publication. The Library will claim this refund from the researcher upon receiving notification from SpringerNature that an article submitted against the University’s deposit account has been published. (Rand value calculated at the exchange rate on the day of claiming the refund).
“Read and publish agreements", often called transformative agreements, seek to shift the contracted payment from libraries to publishers away from subscription-based reading and towards open access publishing.
If the eligible author is affiliated with US, articles will be automatically detected with the organization and the publishers will assist the authors. The Library is contacted by the publishers to verify the author's status at the University.
Authors may have to complete online forms as per the publisher's systems.
Academic publications that are accredited fulfil certain requirements and are thus eligible for financial support from the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). If you would like your article to be recognised or given a subsidy, you should choose a journal that is accredited from the spreadsheet below. Kindly note that there are roughly seven sheets in the DHET spreadsheet to search through.
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