Japan's efforts to make research papers open access are taking shape
In Japan, a system is being put in place to make publicly funded research papers available for free. The academic journal Nature reported on the state of Japanese papers and open access.
Japan's push to make all research open access is taking shape
The Japanese government is making adjustments (PDF file) to require recipients of the Competitive Research Grant System , a research funding system, to immediately make research papers open access. This policy is expected to allow anyone to freely use paper data and supporting data. In addition, 10 billion yen has been secured in the FY2023 supplementary budget for the 'Open Access Acceleration Project.'
The Council for Science, Technology and Innovation, which is leading the discussions, explains the background to considering this policy as follows: 'Research results such as papers and research data produced with public funds should be widely returned to the public, but their distribution is under the market control of global academic publishers and others, and subscription fees and open access publishing fees for papers are rising sharply. This could have adverse effects such as increasing the financial burden on universities, researchers, and others involved in the core of academic research, such as subscribing to academic journals and publishing papers, and undermining the autonomy of the research community.'
Writing in Nature, science journalist Dharmeet Singh Chawla described Japan's efforts as 'one of the first Asian countries to take significant steps to make more research open access, and one of the first countries in the world to develop a national open access plan.'
There are two types of open access: 'green OA,' in which authors themselves publish their articles on the websites of their affiliated institutions, and 'gold OA,' in which articles are published through the websites of journal publishers, etc. The former can be implemented relatively freely depending on the authors' wishes, but the latter requires authors to pay article processing charges (APCs) to publishers, which is seen as increasing costs for authors or the universities or research institutions to which they are affiliated.
Regarding these points, Masakazu Shimazaki, a research promotion bureau counselor at the Ministry of Education
In Europe, an organization called cOAlition S is promoting open access to research papers. Johan Roerick, executive director of cOAlition S, said Japan's green OA strategy 'should be praised,' and that it would be a good idea to implement it for all research papers.
A survey conducted by Kazuki Ide , a public policy scholar at Osaka University, revealed that 571 out of 633 members of the Molecular Biology Society of Japan (91.5%) wanted to make their papers available as open access, but only 478 (76.6%) had actually published their papers as open access. Of these, 500 were faculty and staff members.
Commenting on these results, Ide said, 'This difference may be due to the fact that 21% of the respondents were not faculty members, but the issue of financial burden should not be ignored. In fact, in the free-form comment section of the survey, several respondents mentioned the high cost of article publishing fees and how this puts a strain on research funding.' He introduced the ongoing 'open access agreement,' and argued that it would be desirable for research institutions to provide financial support for the costs of publishing articles.
In 2022, Japan's own preprint server, Jxiv , will be launched , reinforcing efforts toward open access, but awareness of it is said to be low.
According to Ide's survey, 540 people (86.5%) were familiar with the term 'preprint,' and of these, 183 people (33.9%) had posted a preprint. However, about six months after Jxiv's launch, only 111 people (20.6%) of the 540 people who knew about preprints had heard of the server.
Ide points out that 'the advantages of posting preprints are that researchers can quickly share their research results, establish priorities, and deepen the impact of their research results by making them public. The disadvantages are the risk of plagiarism and the lack of guarantee of reliability (because they have not been peer-reviewed).' He goes on to argue that 'it seems meaningful for faculty and students to deepen their understanding and discussion of preprints.'
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