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South Africa's National Assembly has today passed the controversial Protection of State Information Bill, despite the legislation being widely opposed and criticised. South Africa's Protection of State Information Bill, known informally as the secrecy bill, has been passed by the National Assembly with a majority vote of 229 to 107.

Introducing R2K's 2014 Secret State of the Nation Report Today the Right2Know Campaign releases its 2014 'Secret State of the Nation' report, a snapshot study of trends, patterns and challenges with secrecy in South Africa. The report's key findings include signs of abuse of secrecy and continued securitisation of some parts of the state: Increasing [...]

This is an interesting article about the cost of formal publishing verses open access publishing. Although there seems to be a lot of secrecy around the issue, the research shows that the total cost for open access publishing is a lot less than formal publishing. That appears to bring the perception that the open access works are not as good as those published in formal journals. Despite this factor there is growing encouragement to authors to publish their work in open access sources, but traditional models remain very popular. A large percentage of these journals actually allow people to publish online, although some do ask for a time delay. Despite that, many authors do not proceed to publish online after they have gone through the formal process although some authors are obliged to do so by their institution. It could be a good test to see why these authors do not take the step to publish online. Reasons could range from apathy, to not enough knowledge of the process, to a need not to share the information with everyone. Economically, there is also a concern that open access sources will become more expensive as more authors begin publishing in this way.