SANLiC 2019 Conference, 24 – 27 June 2019, Cape Town

The SANLiC 2019 Conference took place at the new conference centre at the Cape Town Waterfront Breakwater Lodge, from Monday 24 to Thursday 27 June 2019. Lazarus Matizirofa, Chrissie Boeyens, Lungile Rathepe and Marguerite Nel were privileged to attend this event.

The conference included pre- and post-conference workshops, vendor and publisher sessions, several meetings (including CHELSA, DVCs, SANLiC members, etc.) as well as the main conference programme. The discussions mainly focused on best practices for eResource librarians and also on different aspects of  OA2020 in preparation of a seamless switch from the current subscription model to a “Pay to publish, then read for free” model.

The pre-conference workshop was titled: “E-resource management 101: Toolkit for e-resources librarians” and was facilitated by experienced e-resource  librarians. Several strategies for optimizing electronic resources and improving library user experience were discussed. 

Speakers from South Africa as well as from all around the globe (including the US, China and several European countries) and from a variety of professions (including researchers, publishers, journal editors, librarians, academics, lawyers) contributed to an exciting, interesting and thought provoking programme. Some of the themes included open science, open access paradigms, transformative agreements, data analysis, core competencies and the user interface and future research scenarios.

The keynote speaker was Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, a Professor at the School of Information and Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.  Jeffrey is also the University Librarian and Chief Digital Scholarship Officer at UC Berkeley  and  co-chairs  the  University  of  California  Publisher  Negotiations  Task  Force. The University of California is one of the pioneers in the rapidly transforming scholarly publishing industry  working towards universal  open  access. In his keynote address titled “Pathways to Open Access: the University of California Experience”, he spoke about the development of a coalition to agree on objectives, strategies and tactics to obtain transformative agreements with some of the world’s biggest publishers (including Elsevier). He continued this discussion in three other separate presentations on the programme. These presentations were titled “University of California multi-payer model and workflows for transformative agreements”, “Breaking up with Elsevier” and “How the University of California prepares for negotiations”. Among several other aspects, he highlighted the importance of keeping all stakeholders informed throughout the negotiations process as well as providing alternative access, in case of cancellations. In this regard, they developed the UC and Elsevier webpage with relevant information on the Elsevier negotiations (https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/). They also created the “Pathways to Open Access 2018 Toolkit”, which can be used by other institutions, planning to enter into transformative  agreements  with publishers. 

All colleagues agreed that they found the conference very valuable and informative.

The University of Pretoria also views the Open Access 2020 Initiative in a serious light, and after a meeting with Prof. Burton, the DLS was instructed to organise a colloquium to discuss this on a high level. More information on this event will be communicated soon.