SAGE agrees southern Africa R&P deal

Through a transformative agreement, SAGE Publishing and the South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC) is to expand publishing opportunities for researchers in South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia. 

The three-year deal will provide researchers with:  

• Open Access (OA) publishing rights, with no cost to the author in Hybrid journals within the current Premier collection.  
• A discount on article publishing charges for SAGE’s 150+ pure Gold Open Access journals.  

Researchers at member institutions participating in the agreement will have access to SAGE’s collection of journals in the social and behavioural sciences and fast-growing list of science, technology, and medical journals. With the help of SAGE’s Open Access Portal, such researchers will be able to: 

• Confidently submit their work in compliance with both current and future OA requirements.  
• Be automatically contacted by SAGE to make them aware of their publishing options.  
• Manage the selection of OA licenses. 

'We're delighted to partner with SANLiC and add to the significant and growing list of SAGE Open Access agreements,' said David Ross, vice president of open research at SAGE. 'This agreement allows access to vital research within both the social and behavioral sciences and technology and medical fields, in support of the learning, teaching and research activities of SANLiC members.'  

Laila Vahed, chairperson of the SANLiC board, commented: 'This is South Africa’s fifth transformative agreement and the largest to date. It is a landmark agreement because SAGE is on our Top Ten list as a reading and publishing venue. The publishing venues of choice for many of our researchers have been either closed or requiring unaffordable author facing charges for open access publishing. We are delighted that our researchers will now be able to publish fully open access in the SAGE journals of their choice without author facing charges while retaining the copyright to their work.'

SAGE serves as a founding member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, as well as being one of two publishing partners in the European Commission-funded FP7 Framework project, the Study of Open Access Publishing. Additionally, in 2011 SAGE launched SAGE Open, the first broad-spectrum open access journal aimed specifically at the social and behavioral sciences.