Open Access in Japan – a multiinstitutional perspective
Acknowledgements
We are much thankful to two essential persons that have made our visit to Tokyo
possible. First, Evelyne Etchebehere from the French embassy has been seminal in
identifying the need for such a visit, providing the corresponding financial andlogistic support and finally managing to have some essential doors open. Second,
Syun Tutiya from the National Institution for Academic Degrees and University
Evaluation, who provided most of our contacts in Japan and identified the central
communities and topics we had to deal with there.

Executive summary
From 27 to 30 January, the French embassy organized an expert visit in Tokyo togather in-depth information concerning the situation in Japan in the domain of open
access to scientific results. The group of 5 experts from France and the Netherlands
met with several major agencies (MEXT, JST, JSPS, NII) as well as research andlibrary communities. A specific meeting was organized with Prof. Harayama,
executive member of CSTI, to exchange strategic options concerning open access inJapan and France.
The present report reflects the very rich interactions that occurred over a week andwhich could be summarised as follows:
•
•

•
•

1

Open access benefits from a strong awareness in Japan at institutional,
academic and library level;
The recent years have seen several developments in setting up infrastructuresthat are likely to favour the wider development of a national open accesspolicy in Japan, particularly in the fields of publication repositories andeditorial platforms;
The evolution in publication costs have accelerated the open access agenda inJapan with the prospect of a national policy being issued in the period
following our visit1;
There are several opportunities for close collaborations between European andJapanese institutions both at political and technical levels.

See https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2016/webprogram/Paper16940.html and thereports cited in the bibliography

Scientific information and open access – an introduction andan overview of the context in France and Europe
The wide dissemination of research results is an essential component of a prosperous
development of science and technology. The legacy of the scientific publishinglandscape, created in the print era, as well as the prospect that the wide deployment of
information technologies may lead to a simplified dissemination of research assets,
have made necessary for researchers, libraries and all institutions involved in higher
education and research to contribute to an in-depth evolution of the scientificcommunication processes.
Without drawing a complete history of the open access movement here, we canidentify some major milestones, which have led to the current situation:
•
•
•

•
•

Dramatic increase in journal subscription costs in the 90’s (so called “serial
crisis”);
Setting of the first publication repositories with arXiv in 1994, following
several year of pioneering dissemination of digital papers on ftp sites, mailinglists etc.;
Emergence of the Open Access movement stating that scientific content, seen
as public goods, should be freely accessible and re-used. We can mention here
the Berlin declaration issued in 2004 and signed by many scientificorganisations worldwide2:
Further deployment of institutional, thematic or national repositories
worldwide (see Romary & Armbruster, 2006) contributing to the expansion
so-called green Open Access3:
Rise of new publishing models based on the payment by authors of an Article
Processing Charge (APC) in order to make the paper available online at thetime of publication (part of what is named gold Open Access4).

Behind the notion of public goods, we can also mention the importance of scientific,
institutional or national sovereignty, whereby publicly funded research should lead to
productions that remain within the remits of their producers. This has directconsequences at various levels: preservation of authors’ copyright, setting up reliableinfrastructures, defining publication costs in accordance to clear services provided bythird parties (as opposed to the current non-competitive publication market), with theobjective of increasing the capacity of public actors carrying out their assessment or
strategic planning duties in full independence5.
In Europe, despite isolated attempts to favour the publishing business6, green open
access has taken up strongly and particularly France has developed a national
2

http://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration
green open access can be defined as the free dissemination of scholarly papers byauthors themselves
4green open access can be defined as the free dissemination of scholarly papers by
the publishing platforms where the article has been submitted.
5
for instance without relying on the sole Journal Impact Factor
6
See for instance the infelicitous proposal in:3

publication repository platform: HAL7. At national level, the French Minister for
Research has issued in January 2013 a strong statement on open access to scholarly
results, where the archiving of publications in open access repositories, and inparticular the HAL national platform, has been given priority, complementary to thedefinition of new viable editorial and business models for scientific publishing.
Some institutions such as Inria or CWI have managed to go even further bymandating researchers to deposit publications within their repositories. Suchmandates are usually linked to annual assessment, whereby the papers in therepositories are taken as the sole source for reporting by researchers or researchteams.
Initiatives are also taking place to develop new publishing models that decouple thenotion of publication, understood as the dissemination of the content publicly online,from the peer-reviewing process. We can mention here the Episciences initiative (SeeBerthaud et al. 2014) in France that offers an environment for implementing so-called
overlay journals on top of existing publication repositories.
Open access is also one element in global reshaping of the dissemination of research
results from a wider perceptive. The issue has for instance been high up on thepolitical agenda of the G7, with its Open Data charter8, and the underlying copyrightissues (re-usability, for instance for text and data mining) is an essential component of
the European Union copyright reform9.

Main objectives
The main objectives for the European delegation during this series of meeting were
the following ones:•••

Understand the situation of open access in Japan, in particular to identify
factors for change in this field;
Compare the main issues in Japan with the political and technical settings inFrance and at CWI;
Identify some possible collaboration themes that would allow our countries todevelop better and stronger open access policies in the future.

Overview of meetings and discussion points
In order to lighten the reading of this report, all participant lists have been moved tothe end of this report as annexes.

http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/faces/viewItemOverviewPage.jsp?itemId=escido
c:2148961
7
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr
8
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-datacharter-and-technical-annex
9
From Julia Reda’s report (Member of the Euorpean Parliament in charge of the
Copyright reform) : https://juliareda.eu/copyright-evaluation-report-explained/#tdm

Contextual information
The Japanese academic landscape is based upon a large group of 774 universities (86national universities, 83 public universities and a majority of 605 private universities).
At a political level, three main institutions are in charge of the higher education andresearch policies: MEXT: Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science andTechnology) and two funding agencies under MEXT supervision: JST (Japan Scienceand Technology Agency) and JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science).
The stay was organised in two complementary types of meetings:− series of discussions with institutional actors, among which Prof. Harayama, theabove-mentioned institutions and the NII management;− workshops dedicated to specific communities of interest and stakeholders.

CSTI (Council for Science, Technology and Innovation)
Yuko Harayama is an Executive Member of the CSTI at the Cabinet Office. The
CSTI has been seminal in producing an important report in March 2015 aiming at
defining a national policy in the domain of open access to scientific results. In thiscontext our delegation had the opportunity to exchange some core ideas with Prof.
Harayama. The main topics addressed during this meeting were the following:••••

Importance of scientific sovereignty and to define ways of mastering thedissemination of scholarly result;
The possibility to go towards a more pro-active policy in the domain ofscientific article deposit in publication repositories, taking the examples of theambitious deposit mandate policies of Inria and CWI;The necessity to experiment new scientific publishing models based on publicplatforms;
International collaboration between Japan and Europe in the above-mentioned
themes.

MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology)“MEXT has started to work with JST to introduce mandatory rule for scientists topublish their papers and data sets open accessible attached to public funds. “In particular, MEXT originated an open access mandate for all PhD theses in Japan in
March 2013 through the institutional repository of the PhD awarding institution.
From an infrastructural point of view, MEXT finances the technical support provided
by NII concerning scientific publication platform and in particular the work carriedout on journal management environments and publication repositories.

JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science)
There are 3 funding agencies in total in Japan, two under the auspices of the Ministryof Higher Education and Research (MEXT): JSPS and JST, one under the auspices ofthe Ministry of Industry (MITI): NEDO. Among the three, JSPS, established in 1932,
represents the biggest one with a budget of around 2 billion Euros per year.
The meeting took place in presence of Makoto Asashima, executive director of JSPS,
and was the opportunity to have an in-depth discussion on open access issues inrelation to the forthcoming report by CISTI due in March 2015.
In the domain of scientific information and open access, JSPS has had several
programs to encourage the move of scholarly society journals from print to electronic,
as well as specific support for gold open access publication. It should be noted thatcurrent plans do not integrate any specific support for green open access.
A specific discussion took place concerning the opportunity to better coordinate open
access issues within the GRC (Global Research Council). G7, ANR

JST (Japan Science and Technology Agency)
JST provided us a series of questions that served as a basis for discussions andallowed us to better understand their current topics of interest. We provide specificdetails about the corresponding interaction.
A specific debate took place during the meeting on the compatibility between thedevelopment of open access journal and the role of depositing papers in publication
repositories. A consensus actually emerged to understand that the necessity of
mandating deposit in public repositories remains when papers are being publishedwithin open access journals, in order to ensure that a reference corpus of scientificpublications be maintained by governmental institutions. The debate also addressed
to related aspects:••

The role of publication repositories for the early (pre-peer review)
dissemination of scholarly manuscripts, with the possibility of both getting
quick and efficient community feedback on scientific results, but also to takeprecedence since such manuscripts can serve, for instance, as prior art during
patent examination. In the case of papers that are not further published (orrefused) in traditional journals, it appears that keeping these records are
essential to maintain a rich scholarly background for future research;
The danger of (probably ephemeral) private platforms such as Academia or
Research Gate offering hosting services for scholarly papers which bring therisk of even more fragmentation of our scientific assets. For countries like
Japan (with Jairo cloud) or France (with HAL) where there exists a national
publication repository strategy, a stronger information campaign should deterscientists from using such platforms to record their productions.

JST expressed their interest in stronger collaboration schemes between Japan andEurope on publication platforms and supported the idea that specific links with thedevelopments carried out within NII should be established.

NII (National Institute of Informatics)
Beyond its core mission as a research institution in the domain of computer science(with 80 permanent researchers), NII plays a central role in the Japanese scientificinformation landscape since it is in charge of implementing and operating the main
national information infrastructures for universities in Japan. If we were to compare to
the French situation, it groups together missions that are spread across ABES (central
catalogue), CCSD (national repository HAL), Persée (digitisation of scholarly
journals in human sciences) and INIST (provision of subscribed content).
An early program initiated between 2004 and 2007 provided initial support for the
implementation of institutional repositories within up to 70 universities:••

NII-ELS is a platform dedicated to the online delivery of digitized legacy
journals from scholarly societies in Japan (thus close to the scope of Persée). It
hosts the content of 109 journals but does not really offer the service of apublication platform. It seems the content is about to move to J-stage;
JAIRO Cloud is a centralized digital research object repository, allowing not
only universities to implement publication portals within it, but also offeringresearch data archiving and publication facilities.

Besides, NII provides targeted services concerning publishers’ copyright policies(SCPL – Society Copyright Policies in Japan, similar to SHERPA/ROMEO) or
assessment of repository downloads (ROAT – Repository Output Assessment Tool).
We consider NII as a model for future scientific information infrastructure where
technical support is strongly coupled with research activities (for instance in thedomain of text and data mining or visualisation).

Library and information science workshop
The workshop provided a comprehensive overview of the situation in various (public
and private) universities in Japan as well as an overview of the current organisational
and technical issues at a national level.
There are as a whole 1486 University libraries (289 national, 129 public and 1068
private) in the academic sector. From an organisational point of view, several
consortia are relevant for the management of scientific information in Japanese
universities:••

10

JCCUL, Japanese Coordinating Committee for University Libraries. It hassigned in 2010 an agreement with NII in scientific information for the higher
academic sector;
JUSTICE (Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources) isthe equivalent organisation to Couperin10 in France in that it is in charge of thenegotiations with publishers, with the difference that its activities do notcomprise the setting up of centralised subscription consortia (“groupement de

http://www.couperin.org

••commande” for Couperin). JUSTICE currently has a membership of 516
libraries in close collaboration with the NII;DRF (Digital Repository Federation) groups together institutional repository
initiatives (150 members). DRF is a member organisation to COAR
(Confederation of Open Access Repositories). This structure seems to evolve
into the Institutional Repository Promotion Committee, set in 2013 between
NII and university libraries;
Finally, SCREAL Standing committee for research in academic libraries.

The Japanese libraries have altogether the quite large budget of 21 831 million Yens
dedicated to subscriptions with a total number of 4970 journal titles. The recent dropof the Yen exchange rate, coupled with an increased VAT applied to subscriptions
and a global reduction in University library budgets dramatically impacted thecapacity to keep to this budget. The current consequence is a tendency to abandon the
big deal model in favour of the identification of relevant title portfolio within each
university.
The institutional repository (IR) landscape was until now extremely fragmented witha large network of 370 university repositories that has steadily (hita-hita, cf. Tsuchide
et alii, 2013) increased over the years. They are mainly operated by the university
libraries and comprise of an impressive number of items (1 400 000) as of 2014. NII
has played strong role in this development by first supporting several university
repository projects and recently by offering a centralised repository service (JAIROcloud) where Universities can develop their own portal, in a setting which is quite
equivalent with what we have in France with HAL11.
Most of the institutional repositories have a “everything welcome policy” (forinstance in Chiba), whereby the aim of the platform is to host all types of scholarly
productions, comprising reports, grey literature at large, theses, wide public articles,
posters etc. in complement to research article in the narrow sense of the term.
University bulletins (or Kiyo), mainly in the social and human sciences domain,
represent a majority of the content of these institutional repositories12. This reflects
the fact that IRs are not seen as a tool for providing open access to otherwise
published material but more of a document repository for locally generated
documents (texts or data). The deposit mandate on PhD thesis can be also seen fromthis perspective.
Universities begin to have difficulties in keeping their maintenance budget for theirlocal institutional repositories, which may lead to a step-by-step switch to JAIRO.
Beyond the budget aspects we see numerous advantages to this, based on our
experience with HAL: coherent meta-data description, connection to national
authority files, quicker take up of new technologies (e.g. visualisation and data
mining) and better connection with international initiatives (cf. Romary andArmbruster, 2010; https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00399881).
11

As opposed to France where major universities have chosen to have their IR portal
developed within HAL, JAIRO Cloud initially took up within smaller universities
which could not afford deploying their own IR environment.
12
Kiyos are also disseminated using the CiNii service from NII (http://ci.nii.ac.jp)

As a general conclusion, we have observed a strong independence of each university,with in general a low political support to institutional repositories at University
management level. Institutional repository contents are also very heterogeneous, and
it is hardly foreseeable that Universities will issue OA mandates in the future, noteven strong requirements. Of course the national request made for PhD theses ensuresat least that most of them are available in the repositories.

Researchers’ workshop
Several projects and institutions were presented, and a broad exchange of views took
place about these projects, that were either in the field of exact sciences as well as
human sciences (in particular: digital humanities). Among the latter, we can cite theprojects of the Japanese Association of Indian and Buddhist Studies13, the Japanese
Association for Digital Humanities (www.jadh.org), the Japanese Association for
Religious Studies (www.jpars.org), or the Research Institute for Sustainable
Humanosphere, Kyoto University (http://www.rish.kyoto-u.ac.jp/), or the Digital Silk
Road Project, one of the pioneers (http://dsr.nii.ac.jp , since 2001).
The National Diet Library, responsible in Japan for legal deposit of books andreviews, also presented its projects; in France, it is not the Diet Library but the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France which is in charge of legal deposit14. The questionof legal deposit of the Web sites (that is implemented in France by a law of 2007), as
well as the legal deposit under electronic format (which is a different question, notavailable in France) have been discussed.
The question of research data (scientific ‘big data’) has also been raised; the Japanesedelegation gave the interesting example of the preservation of records for uniquescientific phenomenon, like eclipses or big earthquakes. This is part of Japanese
implication in the international Research Data Alliance (www.rd-alliance.org).
Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) curates data centres in several scientificrealms, dedicated to this mission of research data preservation.
Several points arose during the discussion between the French delegation and theJapanese institutes, among which:− The possibility of having digital humanities projects better known by a larger
public, for example through Wikipedia (systematically indexing these projects on
the related Wikipedia pages; in the other way, also releasing iconography fromresearch institutes for Wikipedia pages).
− The possibility of associating a larger public to some digital projects: for example
transcription of historical manuscripts by internet users; or “participative science”(in botanic, in astronomy, etc.) where scientific data coming from non-researchers
is aggregated to complement and enrich research data as well as programs.

13
14

www.jaibs.jp
See http://www.bnf.fr/fr/professionnels/depot_legal/a.dl_livres_mod.html

Contextual analysis
For many years, the favourable exchange rate between the Yen and the Dollar, inwhich most subscription contracts were set up, has attenuated the effects of the serial
crisis in Japan and created a feeling of wealth with regards to the private scholarly
publishing sector. This has resulted in the negotiation of numerous big deals between
Japan academia and publishers and also a particularly strong dedication to the newly
introduced Gold open access model, as compared to what has been experienced inEurope. The recent devaluation of the Yen, coupled with an increase of the VAT rate
on foreign products has completely changed the perspective on publishing cost andthe actual role of private publishing in the dissemination of scientific information.
The Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011 has also had an important impact on therole of the government and governmental agencies with regards to scientific research.
Whereas most of the national institutes for instance were quite autonomous indefining their research priorities, the dramatic consequences of the tsunami has
awoken the Japanese authorities to the necessity to define strong research priorities insuch domains as energy, environment or information technology. This in turn has
created a favourable background for a stronger national policy in the scientificinformation domain.
From an academic point of view, the development of scientific information policies inJapan has been subordinated to three main important factors:•••

The fragmentation of the university landscape with 774 universities as awhole and the importance of the private sector (605 private universities as
opposed to 86 national and 83 public universities);
The central role of scientific societies, which have maintained a specificportfolio of scientific journals. This has induced specific initiatives towards
the corresponding publishing sector, for instance in terms of publication
platforms;
A strong autonomy of Japanese universities, and within them of Professors,which lies at the root of the current fragmentation of the publication
repository landscape so far, but also slowed down various initiatives towards
more concerted actions in the open access domain.

In the recent years, Japan has seen a dramatic growth in the number of open accessrepositories within its universities and research organisations. With 388 repositories,
which reflect the fragmented academic landscape in Japan, there are currently great
discrepancies in actual coverage, technical developments and prospect forsustainability across these platforms15. Another important issue is the reduced
coverage of these repositories in terms of real scientific publications (around 15% ofjournal16 articles). Kiyos (departmental bulletins) represent more than a half of thecontent, with also an increasing importance of PhD theses (4,4%) thanks to thenational deposit mandate. The PhD mandate, which explicitly refers to the IR of the15
16

In universities such as KeiO (KOARA repository) with a specific policy, the rate
can reach 40%, with a clear impact on visibility.

awarding institution, has also contributed to the fragmentation of the landscape: no
specific national service has been set in place, as is the case in France with STAR and
TEL17, and the European portal DART18.
The relation to commercial publishers is very specific in Japan with a very highbudget that seems to reflect that commercial publishers have a tendency to see Japanas a “Poule aux oeufs d’or”19: 260 M€ (to compare to the subscription budget inFrance: 80 M€), which has also been amplified by a strong Gold open access policy.
One factor here is the central role for national journals with two additional issues:••

The specific language issue, whereby gold open access are often associatedwith the need of advanced copy-editing in English;
The absence of a real policy for new quality assessment factors, with thejournal citation index remaining a major reference in Japan;

Still, there are several positive factors that are likely to help Japan taking a leadingrole in the open access movement:
•

•

•
•

The dramatic growth of open access repositories in Japan in the recent year,
despite the fragmentation effect we have already mentioned, created a realculture of repository management in Japan as well as a factor for higher
collaboration between Japanese university libraries;
The centralisation role of NII and in particular the recent deployment of
JAIRO cloud20 or the provision of a national journal management platform islikely to create in the very close future a very strong and coherent
infrastructure at the service of forthcoming open access policies21;
Mandate (PhD) MEXT has started to work with JST to introduce mandatory
rule for scientists to publish their papers and data sets open accessible attachedto public funds. [Source MT]
The strong influence of library networks (cf. the pioneering role ofUniversities such as Chiba)

Conclusions – Perspectives
Over the week’s discussions that took place between Japanese and European
colleagues, it has become clear that there is a need for closer collaboration between
us, all in order to go towards a more ambitious scientific information policy thatwould favour the open access dissemination of both publications and data. In
particular, very similar views have been shared concerning the need to take over again
the sovereignty over scientific information, and consequently identify public policies
17

https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/STAR
http://www.dart-europe.eu
19
ガチョウと黄金の卵
20
JAIRO cloud now hosts 60% of all IR in Japan, in particular from smaller
universities with limited in-house implementation resources.
21
A typical example is Chiba University, a precursor in the domain of setting up an
institutional repository and associated overlay services, which now experimenting aswitch to JAIRO cloud.
18

and infrastructures that would ensure that the scientific common goods are notexclusively given away to the private sector. The objective is to be able to provide a
better dissemination of scientific results, but also to offer the possibility to implement
new services (indicators, data mining) based upon a comprehensive pool of scientificcontent.
Several concrete domains have been identified, which could be the basis of futurecollaborations:
•
•
•

•

•

Sharing our principles and the way we communicate towards scientificcommunities. In particular, we need to have a better coordination of our
information concerning the risks of gold open access;Compare our technical developments. It has become clear for instance that NII
and Inria have a very similar role in their being at the intersection of computerscience research and scientific information services development.
Creating better communication channels between our institutions and inparticular our library networks (Couperin in France, JUSTICE in Japan) about
the various negotiations and agreements that are taking place with private
publishers, concerning: subscription deals, gold open access deals and specificlicencing agreements (re-use and data mining). This could lead to theidentification of bilateral coordination when facing major hurdles in futurenegotiations;
Developing strategies to strengthen the role of digital librarians and data
scientists with the perspective to increase the sustainability and re-use of thedigital scientific content that will be produced in the future. The importance ofsuch new professional profiles has been identified by both sides as crucial toscientific information policies in the digital world;
Coordinate the evolution of the copyright legal landscape in order to favour
access and re-use of scientific content;

There are clearly lessons to learn for the French scholarly landscape. The Japaneseexample tells us in particular the danger of having a fragmented publication
repository landscape and French Universities such as Strasbourg or Bordeauxshould look into the consequences of developing and maintaining their own
platforms. From a political point of view, the deposit mandates of Inria and CWI
have clearly been seen as examples that should be followed step by step (hita-hitaagain…) by various university libraries.

References
Promoting Open Science in Japan - Opening up a new era for the advancement ofscience, Report by the Expert Panel on Open Science, based on Global Perspectives
Cabinet Office, Government of Japan, March 30, 2015
− Executive summary:
http://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/sonota/openscience/150330_openscience_summary_e
n.pdf− Full report:
http://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/sonota/openscience/150330_openscience_en1.pdf

Ikuko Tsuchide, Yui Nishizono, Masako Suzuki, Shigeki Sugita, Kazuo Yamamoto,
Hideki Uchijima. "Hita-Hita: Open Access and Institutional Repositories in Japan Ten
Years On". July 2013, Ariadne Issue 71 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue71/tsuchide-etal
Christine Berthaud, Laurent Capelli, Jens Gustedt, Claude Kirchner, Kevin Loiseau,
et al.. EPISCIENCES - an overlay publication platform. Dr. Panayiota Polydoratou.
ELPUB2014 - International Conference on Electronic Publishing, Jun 2014,
Thessalonique,
Greece.
IOS
Press,
pp.78-87,2014,<http://www.ebooks.iospress.nl/publication/36552>. <10.3233/978-1-61499-409-178>. <hal-01002815v2>
Laurent Romary, Chris Armbruster. Beyond institutional repositories. International
Journal of Digital Library Systems, IGI Global, 2010, 1 (1), pp.44-61. <hal00399881>

Annexes
Key figures
FranceJapon

SourcePopulation (in thousands)

65 433

127 547

OCDE 2012

GDP (in millions $)2 612 878

5 961 066

World Bank 2012

GDP world ranking

6th

3th

World Bank 2012

54 680151 837

OCDE 2012

Share of GDP dedicated to research

2,26%

3,34%

OCDE 2012

Nb of researchers (FTE)

249 086656 651

OCDE 2011

0,38%

0,51%

OCDE 2011

International ranking for publications

6th

5th

OST 2011

Share of worldwide publications

3,6%

5,1%

OST 2011

2

OCDE 2012

National expenditure on
current PPP $)Nb of researchers
populationin

R&D (million

proportiontoRanking for patenting under the PCT Treaty 6

Thomson Reuters 2014 Top 100 global#3
Innovators#2

Participants to the expert group
Jos Baeten graduated in mathematical logic at Utrecht University in 1978. He has an
M.Sc. (1983) and a Ph.D. (1985) in mathematics of the University of Minnesota(USA). He worked at the Technical University of Delft (1983-1984), at the Centre forMathematics and Computer Science (CWI) in Amsterdam (1984-1985 and 19891991) and at the University of Amsterdam (1985-1991), before getting appointed in1991 as full professor of computer science at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven(TU/e).
As of October 2011, he is general director of CWI in Amsterdam, keeping a part-time
professorship at TU/e. As of January 2015, this part-time professorship is replaced by
one at the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation of the University of
Amsterdam.
He is well-known as a researcher in formal methods, in particular in process algebra
and its applications. To date, he has supervised 29 Ph.D. degrees. He was scientificdirector of the national research school Institute for Programming research andAlgorithmics (1996-2004), dean of the department of Mathematics and Computer
Science of the TU/e (1996-1999 and 2002-2004), and initiated the Embedded Systems
Institute in Eindhoven (1996). He chairs the steering committee of the CONCUR
conferences and is a member of the KHMW (Royal Holland Society of Arts andHumanities).
Pascal Estraillier is a scientific adviser in the directorate “National Management ofResearch and Innovation” at the French Ministry of Research, in charge of ICT area.
More particularly in charge of the fields of systems, networks and softwares :•Contribution to the definition of the National Strategy of Search andInnovation (SNRI) which lays out the strategic organizations of the government as
regards Research•
Regular Member, representing the Ministry at the boards of directors of the
National Geographic Institute (IGN) and the Institute Telecom, steering committees
of programs of the ANR National Research Agency.
•
Instruction of files within the framework of the 'Investissements d'avenir'
French programs.
He is also a full professor at the Computer Sciences department and the researchLaboratory L3i “Informatics, Image, Interactions” at the University of La Rochelle.
He was Vice-President of the University of La Rochelle, in charge of development
and industrial relationships. He headed the Research Laboratory L3i “Informatics,
Image, Interactions”.

At the national level, he is the scientific manager of the consortium ERT « Digitalinteractivity ». He was the co-founder of the National School of Video Games andDigital Interactive Medias (ENJMIN) which is the first French Educational programon Games at Master Level.
Claude Kirchner is an advisor of Inria’s President since October 2014 and has been
Inria’s CEO for science and technology from September 2010 to October 2014.
He has been a high school mathematics teacher, an associate professor in computerscience, a research scientist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research,and, since 1988, has been a senior researcher at Inria. His scientific interests andcontributions focus on logic and semantic foundations for the design andimplementation of robust, reliable and secure systems. He contributed to theemergence of deduction modulo concepts and of the rewriting calculus. Starting in
1992, he created and directed the Protheo Inria project-team in Nancy. He wasawarded the 2002 Academy of Sciences grand prize for the Franco-Chinese cultural
foundation. He has chaired the scientific and evaluation committees of the programsof the French research ministry and of ANR (the French National Research Agency)
in security and informatics and has been the first director of the Inria Bordeaux – SudOuest research center from 2008 to 2010.
Recently Claude Kirchner has also been involved in the set-up of the FUN (France
Université Numérique) French gouvernemental MOOC initiative and was anorganizer of the Dagstuhl Perpective Workshop on MOOCs (http://www.dagstuhl.de).
He is member of numerous scientific advisory committees, member of the committee
for ethical research in digital science in France (CERNA) and president of Inria’s
Institutional Review Board (COERLE), président of the CCSD (Centre pour laCommunication Scientifique Directe) steering committee.

Alexandre Moatti, 55, is chief engineer of the Mines (General Council for Economics,
Industry and Technology, Ministry of Industry) and at the same time is an associateresearcher at the Paris-VII-Diderot University (History of science and technology
laboratory). He is also the designer and director (since 2008) of the ‘BibNum’ digital
library of history of sciences (MESR) www.bibnum.education.fr.

He is active in the field of digital humanities. He was the Chairman of the ScientificCouncil of the TGE-Adonis (CNRS) from 2010 to 2012, and a co-author of a reporton scientific and technical information (report of the commission Salençon, MESR,
2008), a co-author of a CNRS audit report on the first version of the TGE-Adonis(2006) and the General Secretary of the Steering Committee 'European Digital
Library'. He is the author of several articles, a blog and a forthcoming book on digital
humanities and the uses of the Internet of knowledge.

Laurent Romary is a Head of Research Directeur de Recherche at Inria, France andgeneral head director general of DARIAH. He received a PhD degree incomputational linguistics in 1989 and his Habilitation in 1999. He carries out researchon the modelling of semi-structured documents, with a specific emphasis on texts andlinguistic resources. He has coordinated various EU project, in particular
MLIS/DHYDRO, IST/MIAMM and eContent/Lirics projects. He has been active instandardization activities with ISO, as chair of committee ISO/TC 37/SC 4 and the
Text Encoding Initiative chairing the technical council in 2008- 2011). He has been
involved in the definition of the scientific information policy of CNRS (2005-2006),
the Max-Planck Digital Library (sept. 2006-dec. 2008) and Inria.
Publication list: https://cv.archives-ouvertes.fr/laurentromary

Meeting Open Access with JST (Japan Science and Technplogy Agency)
Date : January 29, 2015, Time : 10:00-12:00
Venue : French Embassy
Participants from JST :Mitsuru MIZUNO, Director, Department of Databases for Information andKnowledge Infrastructure
水野 充 知識基盤情報部 部長
Naoyuki TSUNEMATSU, Principal Researcher, Department of Information Planning
恒松 直幸 情報企画部 上席主任調査員
Wataru ODASHIMA, Senior Researcher, Department of Databases for Information
and Knowledge Infrastructure
小田島 亙 知識基盤情報部 主任調査員
Akira NISHI, Chief, Department of Information Planning西 亮 情報企画部 主査
Takayuki HASEGAWA, Office of International Strategy
長谷川 貴之 国際戦略室

Meeting with NII
Prof. Masaru Kitsuragawa, director of the NII and the president of the IPSJ
(Information Processing Society in Japan)
Jun Adachi, Deputy Director General,
Director, Cyber Science Infrastructure Development Department
Hideaki Takeda, Professor, Principles of Informatics Research DivisionKazutsuna Yamaji, Associate Professor, Digital Content and Media Sciences
Research Div.
Research and Development Center for Academic Networks
Ikki Ohmukai, Associate Professor, Digital Content and Media Sciences ResearchDiv.
Director of Content System Development Office
Koichi Ojiro, Deputy Director, Cyber Science infrastructure Development
Department
Yukino Aihara, Director, Scholarly and Academic Information Division
Nanako Takahashi, Assistant Director, Scholarly and Academic Information Division
Mutsumi Hosaka, Library Liaison Cooperation Office (JUSTICE)

Library and information science workshop
Participants•

Mr. Shinya Kato, Deputy Director, University of Tsukuba Library; Chairpersonof the Institutional Repositories Promotion Committee;
Mr. Masamitsu Kuriyama, Professor, Library and Academic Information Center,
Tokyo Metropolitan University;
Ms. Kazuko Matsumoto, Chief Librarian, Information and Media Center for
Science and Technology, Keio University;
Mr. Taro Misumi, Chiba University Library;
Ms. Yui Nishizono, Kagoshima University Library;
Mr. Sho Sato, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social Studies, Doshisha
University;
Mr. Yoshinori Sato, Professor, Faculty of Letters, Tohoku Gakuin University;
Mr. Kenichi Tomita, General Secretary, Hokkaido University Library;
Ms. Ikuko Tsuchide, Osaka University Library;
Ms. Keiko Yokoi, Tokyo Institute of Technology Library.

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Observers:••

Ms. Mikiko Tanifuji, NIMS: National Institute for Materials Science;
Mr. Syun Tutiya, NIAD-UE: National Institution for Academic Degrees andUniversity Evaluation.

Program
Open Access in Japan: Current condition and vision for the future.
•••

Shinya Kato, University of Tsukuba. "Japanese Academic Libraries: Some
Basic Facts and the Structure."
Masamitsu Kuriyama, Tokyo Metropolitan University. "Institutional
Repositories in Japan."
Yoshinori Sato, Tohoku Gakuin University. "Acceptance and Attitude ofJapanese Researchers to Open Access."

Case studies of Open Access Practices in Japanese Academic Libraries.

•••

Kenichi Tomita, Hokkaido University;
Taro Misumi, Chiba University;
Kazuko Matsumoto, Keio University.

Research workshop
Participants
Masanori Arita (National Institute of Genetics)
Hidemasa Bono (Database Center for Life Science)
Miho Funamori (The University of Tokyo)
Makoto Goto (National Institutes for the Humanities)
Kazuhiro Hayashi (National Institute of Science and Technology Policy)
Takanori Kawashima (National Diet Library)
Asanobu Kitamoto (National Institute of Informatics)
Yasuhiro Murayama (National Institute of Information and Communications
Technology)
Kiyonori Nagasaki (International Institute for Digital Humanities)
Minutes
13:30 Introduction by Laurent Romary, INRIA
13:50-15:30 Open access of academic publication☆ Situation of journals in life sciences in Asia (Masanori Arita, Kazuhiro Hayashi)
10 min-KAKENHI to promote OA (since 2013), publication funding of 20,000,000 yen/5 years (not wellknown)In neighboring Asian countries, Gold OA and new publication models are more active.
APC from 100 USD to 6,000 USD, complementary language editing
Many academic societies in Japan (over 1800), hampering the scale-merit
Most of J-STAGE journals promote free access only (no CC license)
Some societies (eg physics) try promoting OA.
Many journals rely on a legacy but somewhat robust business model with membership fee, this havebeen an inertia not to move to OA
Many learned societies have cooperated with global commercial publishers, some get royalty, some haveto pay money to collaborated with commercial publishers, depending on the quality of journals
Unfortunately we do not have global STM publishing industry in Japan☆ Situation of journals in humanities (Kiyonori Nagasaki)-

NII-ELS (paper-scanned 109 journals) will move to J-STAGE.
Membership fee is not enough to support journals, but members expect to receive printed ones.
No online submission / review system in Japanese OA supports, but only publication.
Elderly people are afraid of cyberspace, do not wish to digitize past publications.
No strong tie with libraries.
Digital publishing often adopts CC-BY-NC-ND.
Many societies do not want OA and the budget is not enough.
4 cases of OA journals in humanities were reported.

☆ Status quo and Issues of Open Access of Academic Publications at U Tokyo (Miho
Funamori)
OA of PhD dissertation:
PhD dissertations went mandatory OA by Ministry of Education (MEXT) since FY 2013 (announced
2013/3)12000 PhD dissertations in Japan, 10% from U Tokyo (2012)

-

Making PhD dissertation OA mandatory caused a lot of work for less equipped staff and librarians
Faculty members feared that the publisher won’t publish the work if prior publication. Also, they feared
they will lose international competition if they open access PhD dissertations.

OA of academic articles
OA is not well known inside Japan but submission to OA-journals is high compared to other developed
countries
Some domestic publications, including English-based and Japanese-based journals, show high OA rate.
Publication in English is important to disseminate science in Japan, and it became a strategy of Japanese
government to disseminate the journals OA
70% of U Tokyo institutional repository is “bulletin papers” (Kiyou).
OA of other academic works
Open Data is not well known either. Moocs are not much popular.
Future steps
Need to raise awareness of OA issues among Japanese scholar
Need to deliberate on “open access policy” at university-level.

15:30-15:40 BREAK
15:40-17:10 Open access of research data
☆ Research Data Sharing and Frameworks (Yasuhiro Murayama)--“Open research data” was agreed on at G8 (2013) (not “open government data”).
Open data, not only literature, is a crucial element of scientists’ consensus about research results, which
will be the shared information resource between of science community and general society.
International frameworks (ICSU-WDS, RDA): Japan hosts the international program office of ICSUWorld Data System (at Natl. Inst. Info. Comm. Tech., Japan).
Situation in Japan (Cabinet Office; CA): Prof Harayama, a member of national Council of Sci. Tech. &Innovation (CSTI), received a message from G8 stating the promotion of RDA (alliance on open data).
Under CA/CSTI, national open science policy is under discussion.
National Diet Library is forming a new 5-year institutional plan trying to include open data anddiscussing data resource preservation.
What to preserve: Data to keep reproducibility; Data to be reused folr new innovation, Data
indispensable as record of history (temporary-increasing data of climate change, earthquake, living
human bodies, societies,..).;ICSU (International Council for Science since 1931) started a new scientific data managemnt committee
ICSU-WDS 2008, based on the two data bodies operating since 1957.
Culture aspect of Open Research Data need long time, like intl. metric system and time zone with 100year scales to change society (Mark Parsons, (2013).
Data citation with DOI starting with commercial STM publishers. How to create a system better than
DOI? Serial crisis on data?
Evaluation of data to preserve is important; review process (like peer review of journal publication) may
work?

☆ Situation of DBCLS (Hidemasa Bono)-

The integrated database in life science (togoDB) using RDF through biohackathon
FirstAuthors’ review activity in CC-BY, TogoTV (tutorial movies), tools to read/write papers
Please see the handout more.
http://figshare.com/articles/Towards_healthy_circulation_of_OA_data_in_life_science/1297182☆ Situation of arts and humanities
Asanobu Kitamoto-

Digital Silk Road project (databases for digital humanities http://dsr.nii.ac.jp)
Toyo Bunko (Library): digitization of 203 books, 59358 pages. Captions are manually annotated.
Geometric correction of maps, photos, and gazettes…
Data integration through language translation, word definition, ..
Platform to show evidences of integration accuracy is important. Non-textual data IDs with annotation.
Interpretation of data is necessary. Such resolution can also be non-textual.

Makoto Goto-

nihuINT is an integrated retrieval system for ancient Japanese Humanities over 150 databases.
The databases are not open. Reuse is impossible. Many access problems still exist.
Archival information, museum information are very well protected.

Takanori Kawashima-

NDL is National Library of Japan, Deposit Library of Japan. NDL's first mission is to contribute dietthrough research,
but also offer services to libraries and public.
Many digitized old books and journals are available through "National Diet Library Digital Collection"
For bibliographic data, NDL search offer APIs.
More contribution to linked open data is anticipated.
NDL Lab: http://lab.kn.ndl.go.jp/ is something like British Library Lab.
It has experimental systems like crowd-sourcing platform(crowd transcription project) and digital
reading support system
NDL expects to establish a knowledge-circulating platform.

17:10 Closing
Citizen science in France is just emerging (like in Japan).

Press release from the French embassy22-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Compte-rendu : Mission d’experts français sur l’Open
AccessUne mission d’experts français portant sur l’« Open Access » a été organisée du 27 au
30 Janvier 2015 à Tokyo, par le service pour la Science et la Technologie del’ambassade de France au Japon.
Une mission d’experts français portant sur l’« Open Access » a été organisée du 27 au
30 Janvier 2015 par le service pour la Science et la Technologie de l’ambassade deFrance au Japon.

22

http://www.ambafrance-jp.org/Compte-rendu-Mission-d-experts

Participants au premier workshop (28 Janvier 2015)
Crédit photo : Ambassade de France au Japon
Une délégation réunissant des experts français dans le domaine de l’Open Access,sujet clé à l’échelle mondiale pour le monde de la recherche, a été invitée par leService pour la Science et la Technologie à venir au Japon du 27 au 30 Janvier 2015.
Cette mission visait à rencontrer l’ensemble des parties prenantes pour faire un pointcomplet sur la situation au Japon en matière d’Open Access et d’envisager depossibles collaborations.
L’Open Access – un nouveau modèle pour la recherche scientifique mondiale
L’Open Access ou « Libre Accès » consiste en la mise à disposition immédiate,gratuite et permanente sur Internet des publications scientifiques issues de larecherche et de l’enseignement. Ce mouvement, initié dans les années 90, a pris del’ampleur ces dernières années face au pouvoir de pression grandissant des éditeurs derevues scientifiques et leur mainmise sur les données, soulevant des questions sur lasouveraineté numérique des pays.
Renforcer la coopération franco-japonaise
La délégation française, coordonnée par l’Inria (Institut national dans le domaine dessciences du numérique, a pu à cette occasion rencontrer les responsables dedifférentes institutions japonaises impliquées sur le sujet de l’Open Access : le MEXT
(Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology), la JSPS (Japan
Society for the Promotion of Science), la JST (Japan Science and Technology

agency), le NII (National Institute of Informatics), et également le Dr Yuko
Harayama, membre exécutif du CSTI (Council for Science, Technology andInnovation). Deux ateliers de travail, l’un réunissant des représentants debibliothèques universitaires, le second les scientifiques japonais impliqués sur cesujet, sont venus compléter ces entretiens. Les discussions ont notamment porté sur :- Les plans existants de souscription aux revues scientifiques et de licenses
nationales (coûts, services associés comme l’archivage et l’exploration dedonnées, ou « data mining »).
- La politique existante et la position japonaise sur la question desmodèles « Gold Open Access » où les auteurs paient pour la publication deleur article, « Green Open Access » où les auteurs déposent une copie de leurs
articles sur une page personnelle ou une archive ouverte, ou encore lesmodèles hybrides.
- Plus particulièrement sur le modèle « Green Open Access », l’état actuel dedéploiement d’archives ouvertes (et la politique menée pour encourager leschercheurs à y déposer leurs publication) et de plateformes d’évaluation et à
contenu éditorial (épi-journaux, « overlay journals »..)- La politique en matière d’accès libre aux données de la recherche :infrastructures et recommandations au niveau national pour la mise àdisposition libre des données de recherche.
De nouvelles possibilités de collaboration, pour la synchronisation d’archives et deplateformes, le développement des services associés, mais également pour l’échange
de bonnes pratiques en vue de sensibiliser les chercheurs, ont été mises en valeur. A
l’issue de cette mission, un rapport fournira un état des lieux sur le statut actuel del’Open Access au Japon et ces perspectives de collaboration.
Contact : Mme Evelyne ETCHEBÉHÈRE, attachée pour les Sciences etTechnologies de l’Information et de la Communication à l’Ambassade de France.