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Open access and its potential impact on public health – A South African perspective

Traditionally, access to research information has been restricted through journal subscriptions. This means that research entities and individuals who were unable to afford subscription costs did not have access to journal articles. There has however been a progressive shift toward electronic access...

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Autores principales: Strydom, Adéle, Mellet, Juanita, Van Rensburg, Jeanne, Viljoen, Ignatius, Athanasiadis, Anastasios, Pepper, Michael S.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9755351/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36531754
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.975109
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author Strydom, Adéle
Mellet, Juanita
Van Rensburg, Jeanne
Viljoen, Ignatius
Athanasiadis, Anastasios
Pepper, Michael S.
author_facet Strydom, Adéle
Mellet, Juanita
Van Rensburg, Jeanne
Viljoen, Ignatius
Athanasiadis, Anastasios
Pepper, Michael S.
author_sort Strydom, Adéle
collection PubMed
description Traditionally, access to research information has been restricted through journal subscriptions. This means that research entities and individuals who were unable to afford subscription costs did not have access to journal articles. There has however been a progressive shift toward electronic access to journal publications and subsequently growth in the number of journals available globally. In the context of electronic journals, both open access and restricted access options exist. While the latter option is comparable to traditional, subscription-based paper journals, open access journal publications follow an “open science” publishing model allowing scholarly communications and outputs to be publicly available online at no cost to the reader. However, for readers to enjoy open access, publication costs are shifted elsewhere, typically onto academic institutions and authors. SARS-CoV-2, and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the benefits of open science through accelerated research and unprecedented levels of collaboration and data sharing. South Africa is one of the leading open access countries on the African continent. This paper focuses on open access in the South African higher education research context with an emphasis on our Institution and our own experiences. It also addresses the financial implications of open access and provides possible solutions for reducing the cost of publication for researchers and their institutions. Privacy in open access and the role of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) in medical research and secondary use of data in South Africa will also be discussed.
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spelling pubmed-97553512022-12-17 Open access and its potential impact on public health – A South African perspective Strydom, Adéle Mellet, Juanita Van Rensburg, Jeanne Viljoen, Ignatius Athanasiadis, Anastasios Pepper, Michael S. Front Res Metr Anal Research Metrics and Analytics Traditionally, access to research information has been restricted through journal subscriptions. This means that research entities and individuals who were unable to afford subscription costs did not have access to journal articles. There has however been a progressive shift toward electronic access to journal publications and subsequently growth in the number of journals available globally. In the context of electronic journals, both open access and restricted access options exist. While the latter option is comparable to traditional, subscription-based paper journals, open access journal publications follow an “open science” publishing model allowing scholarly communications and outputs to be publicly available online at no cost to the reader. However, for readers to enjoy open access, publication costs are shifted elsewhere, typically onto academic institutions and authors. SARS-CoV-2, and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the benefits of open science through accelerated research and unprecedented levels of collaboration and data sharing. South Africa is one of the leading open access countries on the African continent. This paper focuses on open access in the South African higher education research context with an emphasis on our Institution and our own experiences. It also addresses the financial implications of open access and provides possible solutions for reducing the cost of publication for researchers and their institutions. Privacy in open access and the role of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) in medical research and secondary use of data in South Africa will also be discussed. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-12-02 /pmc/articles/PMC9755351/ /pubmed/36531754 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.975109 Text en Copyright © 2022 Strydom, Mellet, Van Rensburg, Viljoen, Athanasiadis and Pepper. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Research Metrics and Analytics
Strydom, Adéle
Mellet, Juanita
Van Rensburg, Jeanne
Viljoen, Ignatius
Athanasiadis, Anastasios
Pepper, Michael S.
Open access and its potential impact on public health – A South African perspective
title Open access and its potential impact on public health – A South African perspective
title_full Open access and its potential impact on public health – A South African perspective
title_fullStr Open access and its potential impact on public health – A South African perspective
title_full_unstemmed Open access and its potential impact on public health – A South African perspective
title_short Open access and its potential impact on public health – A South African perspective
title_sort open access and its potential impact on public health – a south african perspective
topic Research Metrics and Analytics
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9755351/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36531754
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.975109
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