Top South African journals available to world's scholars

Scholars across the globe will be able to access a wide range of peer-reviewed high-quality South African academic journals on the Internet, enhancing the international visibility of local research.

This is thanks to the Academy of Science of South Africa's Scholarly Publishing Initiative.

Publication of journals in Open Access format unlocks peer-reviewed scholarly works in their entirety to the end-user. The articles are in digital format, available online and free from most copyright and licensing restrictions.

The project is supported and funded by the Department of Science and Technology and led by Susan Veldsman, director of the Scholarly Publishing Unit and a specialist in the field of Open Access.

It has been inspired by a wide-reaching movement towards the implementation of online journals, pioneered by the Scientific Electronic Online Library (SciELO) project, based in Brazil. This fully indexed platform has been implemented in eight countries, mostly in Latin America. SciELO South Africa will be the first site of this growing system on the African continent.

SciELO focuses on developing countries where few citizens have access to traditional peer-reviewed academic journals in printed form. This leads to low usage of these publications and to the phenomenon known as 'lost science'.