From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 17:57:12 +0000

A new Q&A in a series exploring the current state of Open Access has
been published. This one is with Michelle Willmers, Project Manager of
the OpenUCT Initiative at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South
Africa.

A former journal publishing manager, Michelle Willmers was drawn to
the Open Access movement after witnessing international publishers
sweep into South Africa and acquire local journals. They then locked
these journals behind paywalls and sought to sell them to local
academic institutions at prices most simply could not afford.

For the South African academic community this was a case of bad to
worse: Historically South African research has not been published over
much in international journals. As such, it has tended to be invisible
to the global research community. Now it was in danger of becoming
invisible to local researchers as well.

Explaining her journey to OA Willmers says, “It was perhaps less of a
case of becoming an OA advocate than having a deep realisation that
the local scholarly communication paradigm was broken. The
conversation around how to first acknowledge and then address this led
in the open access direction.”

It was this same broken local context that led to the creation (in
1997) of the South Africa-based service African Journals Online (AJOL)
— which Dominique Babini referred to in an earlier Q&A in this series.
A local web portal that enables African journals to make their content
available online (and so visible on a global basis without the need to
cede ownership to international publishers), AJOL currently hosts
content from 462 African journals, 150 of which are OA.

And it is this local context that saw the recent launch of SciELO-SA,
a South African version of SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library
Online), the online open-access publishing platform pioneered in
Brazil. SciELO-SA was launched with the content of 26 “free to access
and free to publish” South African journals, and it is expected that
the service will eventually include around 180 of the country’s 300
journals

More here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/michelle-willmers-on-state-of-open.html