Purpose This paper aims to assess the use of electronic journal resource at the University of Dar es Salaam. The study involved the postgraduate students in the School of Education at the University of Dar es Salaam. Design/methodology/approach A combination of questionnaires for postgraduate students and interview for the reference librarians was used, whereby 100 postgraduate students and six reference librarians were involved in the study. SPSS and content analysis were used to analyse the data. Findings Major findings of the study reveal that majority of the students reported using electronic journal resources for various purposes including working on the assignments, research proposal writing, literature review, research report writing, current awareness, leisure and for extra exploration of ongoing scientific debates through peer-reviewed papers. The challenges encountered in the use of electronic journal resources include power outage, inadequate bandwidth, slow download speed, inability to access the resources from home, lack of training, lack of awareness, limited access to computers and difficulty in searching. Finally, the recommendations for improving the use of electronic journal resources are provided. Originality/value This is the first time an effort has been made to assess the use of electronic journal resources by postgraduate students in the School of Education at the University of Dar es Salaam. The study could be used to assess the postgraduate students’ need for electronic resources at the University of Dar es Salaam and other users in higher learning institutions.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to examine the potential opportunities and risks of sharing agricultural research data in Tanzania identified in the existing research literature. Design/methodology/approach: The study involved a review of the literature on research data sharing practices. Findings: The findings indicate that, research data sharing have significant positive benefits among researchers such as increase high research impact; enhancing international community collaboration among researchers with same interests; improving scientific transparency and accuracy of data (Rappert and Bezuidenhout, 2016); increasing research output whereby a single dataset can be used to generate more than one article by different authors; and many more. The risks hampering data sharing practices includes researchers’ fears that data will be scooped, poached or misused (Onyancha, 2016); unreliable electric power; lack of fund to support research data sharing activities; absence of institutional governmental support for data management; perceived lack of evidence benefits (Leonelli, Rappert and Bezuidenhout, 2018); and others. However, in Tanzania research data sharing is relatively new, thus, no any governmental agency mandating or encouraging research data sharing; therefore, there is no research data management; no research open data repositories and no research data sharing policy at any agricultural institution in Tanzania. The study recommends that agricultural researchers should be sensitized to share their data, research data policy and data repositories should also be established to support data sharing practices in Tanzania. Originality and usefulness: From the available literature, this has been the first time that an effort has been made to examine the potential opportunities and risks of sharing agricultural research data in Tanzania. The study could be used by agricultural institutions and other institutions to assess the researchers’ needs in supporting research data sharing. Also, it can be used by the government and institutions to see the need of establishing open data repositories and open data policies to support research data sharing.