RUAHA CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY

The study sought to analyze the challenges facing University researchers in the use and implementation of Open Access model and the ways that could help to promote the use of Open Access scholarly publications in higher learning institutions in Tanzania. The study used cross sectional descriptive survey which was done in two Universities, that is Mkwawa College of Education (A Constituent College of University of Dar es Salaam) and Ruaha Catholic University in Tanzania. A stratified random sampling was used to ensure representativeness of the respondents from each university, followed by simple random sampling which was used to get 275 respondents from each stratum based on their university. Data were analyzed using mean in descriptive statistics to rank the magnitude of each challenge which is hindering the use and implementation of open access and to rank the magnitude of the impacts and each way of promoting Open Access model.Findings related to the challenges that are facing researchers on the use and implementation of Open Access scholarly publications revealed that high publishing cost, lack of awareness, lack of proper technology infrastructure, lack of enough funds, lack of specialized personnel and low quality of Open Access are the main challenges facing researchers in Africa more particularly in Tanzania in their order of impacting researchers. On the other hand findings based on the ways for promoting open access revealed that, there is a need of funding more open access projects, there should be a policy to recognize open access publishing, Improve network backbone and telecommunication network services, self –archive of research output on open access, Support open access movement, Academic reward system and enabling infrastructure are the most methods that can be used to promote the use of open access in their order.

Open access, scholarly model, higher learning Institutions, University researchers