The South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC) is the country’s main vehicle for negotiating collective access to scholarly journals and open-access publishing terms on behalf of its member universities and research institutions. It is a separate organization from the South African government, but its work sits directly downstream of a major 2025-2026 policy development: South Africa’s National Open Science Policy, approved by Cabinet in December 2025 and detailed by the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI) in early 2026. This guide explains what SANLiC does, what the national policy actually requires, and how the two intersect for a researcher or research-administration office trying to determine what compliance looks like in practice.
What SANLiC is, and what it isn’t
SANLiC (the South African National Library and Information Consortium) describes itself as a non-profit organization that facilitates affordable access to scholarly electronic information for learning, teaching, and research by pooling the purchasing power of its member institutions. According to its own published membership information, the consortium represents dozens of research and academic institutions across Southern Africa and holds agreements with more than 50 publishers, including a growing number of read-and-publish agreements. SANLiC is a member of the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC), the informal network through which national and regional library consortia around the world coordinate on licensing practice.
It is important to be precise about SANLiC’s role: it is a licensing and negotiation consortium, not a policy-making body and not the author of South Africa’s National Open Science Policy. SANLiC negotiates the commercial agreements — subscription deals, transformative agreements, and read-and-publish agreements — that give South African researchers access to journals and, increasingly, a route to publish open access without an individual article processing charge (APC). The national policy, by contrast, is a government mandate issued through DSTI. The two are connected in practice because SANLiC’s agreements are one of the main mechanisms through which South African institutions can actually comply with the policy’s open-access requirements, but they are institutionally distinct, and neither this page nor any credible source treats SANLiC as having written or owning the policy.
SANLiC’s publisher agreements
Publicly announced SANLiC agreements include read-and-publish or transformative deals with major scholarly publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, IOP Publishing, and the Company of Biologists, among others. These agreements typically bundle reading access to a publisher’s journal portfolio together with a defined allowance of open-access publishing for corresponding authors at participating institutions, replacing what would otherwise be a per-article APC charged directly to the author or their funder. This is the same structural model used by national consortia elsewhere — for example, Germany’s Projekt DEAL negotiates comparable national publish-and-read agreements with the same class of large publishers. For a general explanation of how this deal type works mechanically, see CASRAI’s guide to read-and-publish and transformative agreements, and for how APC-based open access compares to the routes these agreements replace, see article processing charges in open access and the comparison of gold, green, diamond, and hybrid open access.
South Africa’s National Open Science Policy
South Africa’s National Open Science Policy has a long development history: an Open Science Advisory Committee began drafting the policy in 2019, a draft went out for public comment around 2022, and the policy received final Cabinet approval in December 2025, with DSTI publishing further policy detail in early 2026. It is one of the first comprehensive, government-approved national open science mandates on the African continent.
The policy’s central requirement is that research outputs arising from publicly funded research be made openly available, with the ultimate ambition of extending this expectation to research funded from other sources as well. Its guiding principle — a phrasing shared with several other national and funder-level open science policies internationally, including elements of Plan S from cOAlition S — is best summarized as as open as possible, as closed as necessary, meaning openness is the default but the policy explicitly recognizes legitimate exceptions for security, ethical, privacy, and intellectual-property reasons rather than mandating unconditional disclosure of everything a research project produces.
Beyond the open-access publication requirement itself, the policy is framed as a coordinated national effort spanning policy, infrastructure, training, and incentivization, not a single access rule in isolation. That framing matters for research-administration offices: complying with the policy is not just a matter of choosing an open-access publishing route for a given article, it also implicates institutional repository infrastructure, research data management practice, and how open science activity is recognized in research assessment.
What this means in practice for South African researchers and institutions
- Choosing a compliant publication route. Where a SANLiC-negotiated read-and-publish or transformative agreement covers a researcher’s institution and target journal, publishing under that agreement is typically the most direct way to satisfy an open-access requirement without a separate APC.
- Institutions outside a SANLiC agreement, or publishing in a journal it doesn’t cover. Researchers still need a compliant route: self-archiving a version in an institutional or subject repository (the green route), publishing in a fully open-access (gold or diamond) journal, or, where funding allows, paying an APC directly.
- Attribution and licensing. As with most open-access mandates, the specifics of acceptable licensing (for example, whether a CC BY license is required or merely preferred) sit in the policy’s implementation detail rather than the top-line mandate, and research offices should confirm current requirements against DSTI’s published policy documentation and their own institution’s guidance before assuming a specific license is required.
- Funder-level mandates still apply alongside the national policy. A national open science policy does not automatically override or replace individual funder open-access requirements, such as those from South Africa’s National Research Foundation (NRF); researchers with NRF or other funder support should check both the funder’s specific requirements and the national policy.
How SANLiC’s role supports policy compliance
The practical link between SANLiC and the national policy is straightforward: a national open-access mandate is only workable if researchers have an affordable, well-understood route to comply with it, and that is exactly what a licensing consortium like SANLiC exists to provide at scale. By negotiating read-and-publish terms across the bulk of the major international publishers on behalf of dozens of institutions at once, SANLiC lowers the practical and financial barrier to open-access compliance for any researcher at a participating institution, compared with each institution or author negotiating (or paying for) open access individually. This is the same structural relationship seen in other countries where a national policy mandate and a national or regional licensing consortium operate as complementary pieces of the same open-access ecosystem, rather than the consortium itself being the policy’s author.
For research offices, the practical takeaway is to treat SANLiC’s current agreement list as a living reference — it changes as agreements are renewed, renegotiated, or newly signed with additional publishers — and to check it directly (via SANLiC’s own site or an institutional library) against the target journal for a given manuscript, rather than assuming coverage. The National Open Science Policy sets what is required; SANLiC’s agreements are one of the mechanisms, alongside repositories and funder policies, through which that requirement gets satisfied in practice.
Frequently asked questions
Is SANLiC a government body?
No. SANLiC is a non-profit library consortium representing member research and academic institutions; it negotiates commercial licensing and open-access agreements. South Africa’s National Open Science Policy is a government policy issued through the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI) and approved by Cabinet.
Did SANLiC write South Africa’s Open Science Policy?
No. The policy was developed through an Open Science Advisory Committee process beginning in 2019, with public consultation and eventual Cabinet approval in December 2025. SANLiC is not the policy’s author, though its agreements are a practical mechanism institutions can use to help meet the policy’s open-access requirements.
Does every SANLiC agreement include open-access publishing rights?
Not necessarily. Some SANLiC agreements are primarily subscription and reading-access deals, while others are structured as read-and-publish or transformative agreements that bundle an open-access publishing allowance. Researchers and research offices should check the specific terms of the agreement covering their institution and target journal rather than assuming open-access publishing rights apply uniformly across all of SANLiC’s agreements.
What if my target journal or funder isn’t covered by a SANLiC agreement?
Other established open-access routes remain available and are commonly used to meet open-access mandates: self-archiving a permitted version of the manuscript in a repository (green open access), publishing in a fully open-access or diamond open-access journal that carries no reader-facing paywall, or paying an article processing charge directly where a funder covers it.
This guide reflects publicly available information about SANLiC and South Africa’s National Open Science Policy as of mid-2026. Consortium agreement coverage changes over time; readers should confirm current agreement terms directly with SANLiC or their institutional library, and confirm current policy implementation detail directly with DSTI, before relying on specifics for compliance decisions.
