After years of public and government consideration, the South African government approved a National Open Science Policy in December 2025. It requires all research outputs that arise from public funding be made available open access. The Department of Science, Technology and Innovation published details of the landmark policy in March 2026.
“Faster, less costly access to scientific results, data, and methods can accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and the uptake of the results,” the policy states. “Global inter-connectedness supports the rapid exchange of these outputs.”
Discussions on the policy go back to 2019 when an Open Science Advisory Committee began to draft the policy. Feedback from the public was elicited in 2022 before it was finally voted on by the government. It is one of the first comprehensive, government-backed Open Science mandates on the African continent.
Dr. Nokuthula Mchunu, manager of international collaborative research grants the National Research Foundation in South Africa.
“It’s a big step forward in having a document that we can, as a community, say has been accepted by our government, where before we relied on the 2021 UNESCO Recommendations on Open Science,” said Dr. Nokuthula Mchunu, manager of international collaborative research grants the National Research Foundation in South Africa and former deputy director of the African Open Science Platform. “I’m very excited about the policy.”
The open science movement in South Africa has been driven by a push for equity, inclusion and social justice. Support for the UNESCO recommendations on open science came from a variety of scholars, including those not at mainstream universities who have been excluded from the academic system, and more crucial for the department of Science, Technology and Innovation, Dr. Mchunu said.
A coalition of South African university leaders and experts supported the drafting of a national policy, along with researchers from big data, nonprofits and advocates of indigenous knowledge. There were two large, stakeholder engagements on the policy to get input from the public.
Under the new policy, open access is now compulsory for all publicly funded research. It cites the principle – “as open as possible, as closed as necessary” – a nuanced framing that acknowledges exceptions for security, ethics, and intellectual property, while defaulting to openness.
As the country implements the new policy, Dr. Mnhunu said, there needs to be agreement on what is meant by open access in practice, funding and enforcement. Details on how to transition away from commercial publishing to something more sustainable will need to be ironed out and a network developed to monitor application of the policy, she said.
There are calls in South Africa for a national fund to cover article processing charges (APCs) so researchers aren’t penalized for publishing in open. Dr. Mnhunu said the community needs to recognize that the government has many priorities, therefore, it is important to reconfigure the current financial system resources already in the system to move away from APCs.
“I’d like to use money we are giving to commercial publishers to build a public infrastructure to support knowledge dissemination,” Dr. Mnhunu said. “Until we support knowledge dissemination as a public good issue, we are not going to have real open access and open science.”
The academic reward system continues to be a big barrier for the expansion of open science, Dr. Mnhunu said. South Africa is trying to explicitly link open science to research assessment reform, so sharing data and open publishing count toward promotion in order for research to achieve greater societal impact.
“My dream is for academics to be communicating science as soon as possible, in as many languages as we can and making sure that we solve real problems for society – not academic problems,” Dr. Mnhunu said.
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In Australia, major funders are leading the way with open policies.
The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) recently embraced preprints. Their Open Science Policy released in February allows grantees the option of submitting their results as a draft manuscript before publication. The policy also supports reproducible research by calling to publish negative results, share code and software openly, and embrace equitable practices.
Janet Catterall, program manager for Open Access Australasia (OAA)
“It’s been quite revolutionary,” said Janet Catterall, program manager for Open Access Australasia (OAA).
This decision comes after NHMRC removed its 12-month embargo in 2022, which requires research results be available immediately as open access.
The Australian Research Council (ARC) also just issued a revised Open Access Policy that is in line with NHMRC. It now calls for immediate open access through one of two routes: a repository or Gold OA. ARC is strongly encouraging books and non-traditional research outputs to be made open as soon as possible.Both funders explicitly mention Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance and and express commitment to the Maiam nayri Wingara Indigenous Data Sovereignty Principles, developed by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led collective. Both policies expect free, prior, and informed community consent, ongoing community involvement in design, analysis, and dissemination and adherence to national guidelines.
“It’s massive to have both our major funders on board,” Catterall said of the organizations’ support for Indigenous rights to govern their own data.
The funders have consulted with the open community, including OAA, on the revised policies. Both include a rights retention statement for authors to use when submitting – whether publishers pay attention, is another question, said Catterall.
[See OAA’s support of the new requirements in its response to the NHMRC/MFF policy and ARC policy.]
While she is encouraged by the advances, the absence of language addressing monitoring for compliance leads to the assumption that the responsibility must fall to the administering organization. Also, Catterall notes there need to be alternative ways of assessing research that moves away from publishing in journals with high impact factors if open is going to be embraced.
“It doesn’t seem on the surface that it’s an open access topic, but it’s very aligned,” she said of the issue of revising the reward system for scholars. “If you don’t change the culture, you’re never going to get very far.”
A 2023 report on the OA landscape in the region provides a snapshot of the growing adoption of open practices. COKI aggregated data estimates about 41% of research outputs in Australia are published as open access, but data from the last year suggest it’s closer to 62%. (OA dashboard created by Tom Saunders, University of Auckland).
The release of the updated NHMRC/MRFF and ARC policies offers the open access community a timely chance to advance these critical conversations. “It’s an opportunity to start having really pointed conversations to raise awareness about the requirements and advocate strongly,” she said.
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