Original Research

Researchers' perspectives on open access scholarly communication in Tanzanian public universities

F.W. Dulle, M.K. Minishi-Majanja
SA Journal of Information Management | Vol 11, No 4 | a413 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.4102/sajim.v11i4.413 | © 2009 F.W. Dulle, M.K. Minishi-Majanja | This work is licensed under CC Attribution 4.0
Submitted: 26 March 2009 | Published: 20 April 2009

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F.W. Dulle,, South Africa
M.K. Minishi-Majanja,

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Abstract

This research explored the awareness, usage and perspectives of Tanzanian researchers on open access as a mode of scholarly communication. A survey questionnaire targeted 544 respondents selected through stratified random sampling from a population of 1088 university researchers of the six public universities in Tanzania. With a response rate of 73%, the data were analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences. The study reveals that the majority of the researchers were aware of and were positive towards open access. Findings further indicate that the majority of researchers in Tanzanian public universities used open access outlets more to access scholarly content than to disseminate their own research findings. It seems that most of these researchers would support open access publishing more if issues of recognition, quality and ownership were resolved. Thus many of them supported the idea of establishing institutional repositories at their respective universities as a way of improving the dissemination of local content. The study recommends that public universities and other research institutions in the country should consider establishing institutional repositories, with appropriate quality assurance measures, to improve the dissemination of research output emanating from these institutions.


Keywords

Institutional repositories; Open access publishing; Public universities; Scholarly communication;

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Crossref Citations

1. Barriers to Open Access uptake for researchers in Africa
Professor G.E. Gorman and Professor Jennifer, Moya Fox, Susannah Micaela Hanlon
Online Information Review  vol: 39  issue: 5  first page: 698  year: 2015  
doi: 10.1108/OIR-05-2015-0147
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