Dear colleagues,
I am glad to have an opportunity to let you know that Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology(MEXT) released a report of the discussion of open access to scholarly research results on a workgroup for scholarly communication infrastructure in July. Unfortunately, as we have no official English translation of the report, you may not be able to have direct full access to it, but hoping its URLs will be a help, let me quote them: (Executive Summary) http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/gijyutu/gijyutu4/toushin/attach/1323861.htm (Full text) http://www.mext.go.jp/component/b_menu/shingi/toushin/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2012/08/02/1323890_1_1.pdf The workgroup, chaired by Professor Setsuo Arikawa, President, Kyushu University, consists of experts and scholars in scholarly communication, and discusses topics including university libraries, campus computing and networking within the scheme of MEXT's Council of Science, Technology and Scholarship. It has spent about a year working on the issues around society publishing, open access and institutional repositories and compiled the report, which comprises five chapters: 1. the provision of scholarly communication infrastructure and the enhancement of dissemination and communication of scholarly information; 2. the remodeling of a category in the JSPS grand-in-aids for the improved dissemination of scholarly outcomes by way of periodical publication; 3. the promotion of open access to research results from competitively funded research activities; 4. the enhancement of the scholarly dissemination by way of institutional repositories; 5. the improved collaboration among the government controlled agencies involved scholarly communication, including the National Institute of Informatics(NII), Japan Science and Technolgy Agency(JST), the National Diet Library(NDL) and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science(JSPS). Chapter 1 introduces the range of topics and explains the backgrounds. Chapter 2 proposes a remodeling of the category in the funding scheme for journal publishing which has been mainly made use of by Japanese society publishers to compensate for deficits in their publishing operations. The proposed new model focuses on enhanced contribution to the increased variety and future sustainability of the scholarly communication worldwide by the scholarly publishing activities which originate in Japan. Within the proposed scheme, which, as a whole, replaces the foregoing subsidies for print periodical publishing, there is a new category earmarked for projects that aim at a launch of or a conversion to open access publishing model. Chapter 3 endorses the importance of the open access to research results in general and to those funded by public subsidies in particular and discusses the various methods for its implementation, from "golden" open access journal publishing to "green" open access by way of repositories, and suggests that, for the time being, institutional repositories be to be made full use of as a means of making research available to society. Chapter 4 discusses the current status and future perspectives of institutional repositories implemented by universities, colleges and research institutions in Japan. More than 250 educational and research institutions, which account for a quarter of such organizations, were started in last five years and now provide, open to the public, more than one million full text scholarly achievements including peer reviewed journal articles, unrefreed but academically substantial outcomes from the faculty, theses and dissertations, learning materials and scientific data. The report takes the repositories seriously as a platform for institutional accountability and scientific dissemination and requests the institutions and their researchers to support the continued and upgraded operation of repositories. Chapter 5 discusses and recommends a set of possible, and partly realized, collaborations among the different institutions with different backgrounds which, though, work in the field of scholarly communication. Those of you who are interested in further details in the absence of the official English translation may post specific questions to this list in the hope that some of my colleagues will reply. ==================== SHUTO Makoto Cheif, University Library Unit Office for Science Information Infrastructure Information Division, Research Promotion Bureau Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology ==================== _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
