Publishing your work is an essential part of research life, and choosing where to publish is therefore an important consideration. Your choice will be influenced by traditions, decisions and preferences in your scholarly community.
The golden rule is to publish in high impact accredited journals. For greater visibility the tendency to publish in high impact accredited open access journals has become a preferred way of publishing for many researchers.
A new Research Output Policy (2015) has been published for implementation from 1 January 2016 by the Minister of Higher Education and Training. The Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) issues, each year on or before the 31st of January, official lists of journals that will qualify for subsidisation for the reporting year. The new policy was applied to the 2016 research output that was reported on in 2017 and will be applied to research output in the coming years.
Accredited journals appear in these lists approved by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). These lists are published on the library website under "Search" - “Accredited journals”
In 2021 the DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals was added by the DHET to the lists of accredited journals.
| The following link is the Alphabetical integrated list of accredited journals (including all 7 lists below) | |
| Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Core Collection (previously called ISI). | |
| IBSS (International Bibliography of the Social Sciences) | |
| DHET Accredited Journals List of South African Journals | |
| Norwegian | |
| ScieLO SA | |
| Scopus | |
| DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals | |
According to the Department of Higher Education and Training’s Research Output Policy, only articles published in approved scholarly journals are subsidised. Only complete, peer-reviewed articles in journals are accepted for subsidy. The following types of articles are not subsidised:
(a) Correspondence to the editors
(b) Abstracts or extended abstracts
(c) Keynote Addresses
(d) Obituaries
(e) Book reviews
(f) News articles
(g) Advertorials
The Department of Higher Education and Training maintains the list of South African journals that meet the criteria set out in their Research Output Policy. South African journals not appearing on the approved lists of journals, but meet the policy's minimum criteria, can apply for accreditation. All South African journals currently not listed in any international index are encouraged to seek inclusion in such indexes and meet the stringent criteria for high-quality international journals. SA journals which do not achieve inclusion in any of these indexes and which continue to meet the criteria for accreditation to a separate list of South African journals remain in the latter list.
The University of Pretoria has become an open scholarship institution that supports open access to research literature and disseminates its own research output on an open access basis. It supports open access publishing in open access journals and archiving of theses and dissertations and research output in the institutional repository UPSpace.
Researchers have also started publishing research papers in OA journals. Gold Open Access is a term to describe when authors provide open access by publishing in an open access journal.
Open access journals do not charge a subscription fee, but charge “Article processing charges” from either the authors or funding institution in order to make the content freely available to any end-user in the world. The UP has recently compiled a policy on Open Access Publishing Article Processing Charges to guide and manage a fund that supports Open Access Article Processing Charges. A document with Guidelines for application to the University of Pretoria’s Open Access Fund for Article processing Charges is also available. The fund will provide partial support for articles published in accredited open access journals with an acceptable impact factor.
Of late, for-profit publishers have taken interest in publishing OA journals and OA articles in hybrid journals. A Hybrid journal is a journal which itself is not fully open access, but authors may pay article processing charges to make their articles open access. A transformational agreement with a few publishers led to UP authors being allowed to publish OA articles freely in a number of hybrid journals. A list of these journals can be found on the webpage for accredited journals.
The Veterinary Library has also compiled a general list of accredited open access journal titles with impact factors to consider for publication
A transformational agreement between SANLIC (South African National Library and Information Consortium) with Wiley, The Assn for Computing machinery (ACM) and sections of Emerald, now allows UP authors to publish open access articles free of charge in journals from these publishers the library subscribes to (hybrid journals). All academic libraries in South Africa are part of this agreement. To publish an article in Wiley's open access journals, will still require the payment of an APC.
Only original research articles or review articles qualify where the UP author is the corresponding author.
An alphabetical title list of accredited journals that are included in this agreement is available on the Department of Library Services’ website at https://www.library.up.ac.za/ld.php?content_id=65993708
An excel list with titles selected from this main list which veterinary science researchers may consider, can be found here.
