Academic institutions and governmental agencies in South Africa have signed the Confederation of Open Access Repositories’ (COAR) petition against scholarly publishing giant Elsevier and its new sharing policy. They join a host of institutions from around the world. The full petition and signatories can be found here.
Robert Moropa from the University of Pretoria expressed concerns about increased embargoes on research saying: “[These] policies will have an impact of up to 25% of the materials that we upload to [our institutional] repository, meaning that 25% of [the university’s] research outputs, in post-print version, will be embargoed for at least 12 months but could go as high as 36 months… This will influence our visibility, citations, rankings and the moral obligation we have to make research accessible to the general public that supported this research… by paying their taxes.”
Read the full article on the Mail and Guardian here.
