Barriers to Open Access Publishing at the University of Zambia

Abstract

There is currently a significant amount of locally relevant research conducted at The University of Zambia, The University of Zambia has a total of six official journals and three associated with postgraduate students however, most of the research output is published in print-based media, making it difficult for the output to be easily available to a much wider audience. Open access publishing provides a potential solution for increasing the visibility of such research output. The University of Zambia has six local publication venues and only two of the six are found online which is on the directory of open access journals. There are barriers as to why this is so and among them are legal framework, Cost, policies and infrastructure.