The Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) defines an accredited/approved journal as follows:
"Journals refer to peer-reviewed periodical publications devoted to disseminating original research and new developments within specific disciplines, sub-disciplines or field of study. These include original articles, research letters, research papers, and review articles."
The department will therefore only subsidize research articles being published in approved, accredited journals.
Accredited journals are research articles that are recognized by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) because it meets specified criteria (eg. peer reviewed) and therefore qualify for subsidy by the DHET.
The South African Department of Higher Education and Training made several lists available of quality journals that is accredited.
For a very long time the South African Department of Higher Education and Training only accepted journals from the Web of Science for accreditation, but there are now several lists that can be used. Below are a number of these with the applicable links where we do have access to the lists:
Web of Science (WoS) Core collection:
Science Citation Index
Social Science Citation Index
Arts and Humanities Citation Index
List of approved South African Journals (Maintained by DHET)
To access databases TUT subscribe to like Web of Science and SCOPUS, please visit the following page for assistance on how to access these resources: How to access the TUT Electronic Resources
Open Resources are available free of charge on the Internet. Please click on the links to access the resources.
International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS)
Unfortunately TUT does not have access to this resource, but enough cover can be found in all the above resources.
The Library and Information Services (LIS) realize the importance of accreditation when our Academics and Researchers want to publish. Most of the the big deals the LIS enter into with publishers is usually big academic publishers that support accreditation and work hard towards higher impact factors. Journals must perform well over a certain period of time in order to qualify for accreditation and the criteria are quite strict. Some criteria involve frequency, peer review processes, scientific reliability, article retraction rates, number of articles being published, rejection rates etc. Normally it is very difficult for any publication to meet these criteria, but for young newly established publications it is exceptionally difficult. Journal publisher deals TUT enters into agreement with, normally has a 70% plus accreditation rate, and we therefore urge our academics and researchers to check accreditation before they submit their manuscripts. Newly published journals on these platforms might not have accreditation status as these publications have not yet met qualification criteria. It is therefore always wise to check accreditation status, using the lists above.