Susan Veldsman has been Director of the Scholarly Publication Unit at the Academy of Sciences in South Africa since 2009. Early in her career, she started off as an Information Librarian, at various Higher Education Libraries in South Africa where she eventually was promoted to Assistant Director of Client Services, Library Services at the University of Johannesburg. In 2002 she moved to a national project, South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC) where she was responsible for negotiating access to commercial databases and was actively involved in promoting Open Access and setting up Institutional Repositories. In 2006, she continued this work in an international consortium, eIFL.net, in other transitional and developing, member countries worldwide.

She is responsible to drive the Open Science agenda by advocating for the opening up of the entire research process from agenda-setting to the dissemination of findings. She is also responsible for raising the visibility, discoverability and accessibility of South African scholarly journals through Open Access and online journal content management; improving the quality of South African scholarly journals, books & conference proceedings through expert peer review panels; and finding solutions to further support the development of policy frameworks in order to facilitate optimal use and access to publicly funded research.