From Barriers to Breakthroughs: Opening Up Science in South Africa. Lay summary video

Imagine you’re a film critic choosing between Netflix and Disney+. You could pay for all to see everything — but it’s expensive. Researchers face the same issue with journal subscriptions: many options, high costs.

Like filmmakers wanting their work seen, scientists want their studies read. That’s the idea behind Open Science — making research transparent, free and accessible to everyone, speeding up discovery and reducing global inequality.

But there’s a catch: if research is free to read, who pays the bills? Many journals now charge authors instead of charging a subscription fee, shifting costs to researchers and their institutions.

Let’s dive into this by looking at the article published by Dr. Strydom and her team in 2022. The article is a review, which is a study looking at a large selection of published research to draw wider conclusions around open access in South Africa, since it’s one of the leading open access countries. This article looks at how open access — making research free for everyone to read — is used in South African universities. It also talks about the costs of publishing research and shares ideas for how to make it more affordable for researchers and their institutions. The paper also explains how privacy and data protection work in open access, and how South Africa’s law helps keep people’s personal and medical information safe when research data is shared or reused.

There are different systems used to rank journals and show how much impact they have. The most common one is the impact factor, which measures how often a journal’s articles are mentioned elsewhere or ’cited’ compared to how many it published in the last two years. Journals with higher impact factors are usually seen as more influential. Those are the journals researchers are excited to get into.

Before an article is published, it goes through a process called peer review, where other experts in the same field check the research to make sure it is accurate, trustworthy, and high quality. The better the journal, the tougher this review process usually is — which means it can be harder to get accepted. Articles that are cited more often can also raise a journal’s impact factor and reputation.

Research can be shared more quickly through preprints, which are early versions of papers released before peer review — something that became very common during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journals listed in big databases like PubMed, Scopus, or Medline are generally considered reliable and of good scientific quality.

However, not all publishers follow honest practices. Some so-called predatory journals pretend to be high-quality but skip proper review to make money from authors’ fees. Publishing in these can damage a researcher’s reputation and weaken trust in science. Next we will look at all of this in more detail.

The review article first addresses open access publications. Open access lets anyone read research for free. There are different types — gold, green, bronze, hybrid, and diamond — and the costs vary. In most cases, authors or funders pay article processing charges (APCs) so others can read the work freely. Open access increases visibility and can lead to more citations and recognition for researchers and their universities.

In South Africa, publishing in journals approved by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) brings extra benefits, like government funding for universities. Reviewers who check articles usually don’t get paid, but may receive fee waivers or recognition through websites like Publons, which record their reviewing work for CVs and job applications.

Overall, the authors conclude that open access helps share knowledge faster and more widely, supporting both researchers and the public.
The review explains that preprints—early research papers shared before review—helped scientists share COVID-19 findings fast, including tracking new variants in South Africa.

But without review, errors can spread quickly, especially online. To prevent this, sites like bioRxiv and medRxiv now screen papers more carefully. The review stresses that open science works best when data are shared ethically, transparently, and clearly marked as unreviewed.

When researchers struggle to publish in top journals, some turn to predatory journals—publishers that charge fees but skip proper peer review. A 2022 report found over 15,000 of these worldwide. In South Africa, one study showed that 728 papers published in just five such journals cost researchers around £3 million, driven by pressure to publish and limited access to reputable options.

Predatory journals damage the reputation of researchers and institutions. The review suggests that open access funders and institutions can help prevent this by encouraging publishing only in credible, transparent journals that follow clear open-access principles.

Next the review moved on to talk about Article processing charges (APCs for short) and publisher profits.

It explains that publishing open access can be very expensive for researchers, especially in Africa, where currency exchange rates make costs much higher. Unlike traditional journals where readers or libraries pay to access papers, open access journals often charge authors large APCs— for example, Nature charges around £8,000 and The Lancet about £4,200 per paper.

Mainstream journal costs are unaffordable for most universities. At the University of Pretoria’s ICMM, publishing just 10 papers in 2021 cost £14,000—a third of its research budget. In 2018, 15 South African universities spent about £50 million on journal subscriptions, meaning researchers must pay to publish and to read.

The review highlights that these high fees make it harder for scientists in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to share their work openly. It calls for urgent discussions about fairer publishing costs and more support for African researchers.

Publishing has become a big business. The review notes that the world’s top five companies — Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE — control more than half of all academic journals. Elsevier alone recently reported £2.64 billion in revenue and £1.92 billion in profit, which is almost the same as the entire yearly budget for South Africa’s provincial hospital system that serves about 48 million people.

Most of the costs of producing journal articles — research, writing, and reviewing — are already paid for by universities and public funding, but publishers still charge £1,200 to £5,000 per article. The review argues that this “asymmetric business model” means publishers profit heavily from work that academics and institutions provide for free.

The South African National Library and Information Consortium, SANLiC, a non-profit helping South African universities get fair journal prices, spent about £22 million in 2020—mostly with the five biggest publishers. Yet only half of local research appears in these journals, and just one-third is open access.

The review explains that costs remain unsustainably high and are often hidden due to confidential contracts with publishers. South African universities together spent over £55 million in one year on electronic resources, books, and copyright licences — expenses that continue to rise with currency changes.

To improve access, many African universities now use institutional repositories — online collections that store and share research freely. Countries like South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana have dozens of these repositories, which help increase the visibility of African research.

The review also mentions tools like Unpaywall, a legal browser extension that helps people find free copies of academic papers, and Sci-Hub, which does the same but illegally. Overall, the review highlights that while progress is being made, open access in Africa still faces big financial and legal challenges.

The University of Pretoria supports open access publishing through strong policies. A 2021 policy makes research freely available while following ethical standards, and an Open Access Fund helps cover publishing fees. The university also signed read-and-publish agreements with major publishers, allowing many researchers to publish for free.

South Africa’s data protection law, called POPIA, affects the way researchers share open data, especially in medical and genomic studies. Sharing research data helps scientists work together, check results, and make new discoveries, but it must also protect people’s privacy and personal information.

POPIA governs how personal data is used and shared. While some fear it limits data sharing, others say it still allows safe, anonymous research. A new Code of Conduct will guide researchers on applying the law.

Interestingly, the review notes that while open access research was once seen as lower quality, most researchers now view it positively. The key to maintaining quality is ensuring that journals use a strong peer-review process and avoiding predatory journals that skip proper checks.

To make open access publishing fairer and more affordable, especially for researchers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) the paper suggests that publishers could reward peer reviewers with vouchers for their institutions to help cover publishing or subscription costs.

Researchers are encouraged to ask for fee waivers or discounts, include publishing costs in grant budgets, and use university or government funds when available. Many international initiatives try to help with this.

Knowledge should have no borders. Yet even within open science, many researchers remain disconnected from the global community. We need stronger, fairer policies that unite academic networks across countries — so that everyone stands equal before knowledge.