Open Access Publishing: the emerging opportunity for wider dissemination of scholarly output

The purpose of this paper is to create awareness on the part of researchers and the scholarly community at large regarding the new publishing opportunity for dissemination of their research findings. It highlight on limitations of the current business model of scholarly publishing in dissemination of scientific information as the main cause for the emergence of open access. The paper introduces open access: a means of free availability of scholarly content on the Internet, permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself. Open access journals and self-arching as the two main approaches of open access publishing are highlighted. Compares adoption of open access between developed and developing countries. The paper further presents preliminary findings on the awareness, usage as well as researchers’ general perspectives about open access scholarly communication in Tanzanian public universities. The overall results of the study indicate that many researchers use open access to access scholarly content and generally support the new mode of scholarly communication