### 4. Strengthening Information Dissemination Capacity through Utilisation of Institutional Repositories

### a. Roles and Meanings of Institutional Repositories

A wide variety of intellectual outcomes produced at universities and other institutions are the core element in the construction of "knowledge infrastructure," which is purposed in the Fourth Science and Technology Basic Plan. It is universities and other research institutions wanting to meet the needs of society that are primarily responsible for the accumulation and dissemination of such intellectual outcomes with their institutional repositories to be recognised as important means for fulfilling such social obligation, and to be developed and strengthened accordingly. This statement is consistent with the idea of the increased transparency of education and research at universities which was described in relation to the plan of the tentative "University Portrait," as described in the "Execution Plan for University Reform" (June 2012).

At universities and other institutions, the institutional repositories play a wide variety of roles, not limited to open access, which provide better environments for research, and teaching and learning.

### b. Current Status of Institutional Repositories

○ Institutional repositories have been created and maintained by universities and institutions through librarians' voluntary efforts. Currently, institutional repositories have been serving at about 250 national, public, and private universities. In addition to the institutional repositories run by individual universities and other institutions, cooperative repositories are being actively started through institutional cooperation in various communities and regions. JAIRO Cloud, which launched by NII and provides a shared repository system for universities and institutions, is expected to accelerate the establishment of institutional repositories.

In effectively utilising the system of institutional repositories, coordination and system-wide data analysis across repositories are essential. Tools that make it possible have been already started and operated.

According to JAIRO, a tool for searching across institutional repositories installed by NII, there are about 510,000 bulletin articles, about 160,000 science journal articles, and 40,000 theses out of the roughly 1,000,000 content materials which are deposited in institutional repositories. Those materials are most accessed from within Japan.

### c. Challenges and Considerations in Enhancing the Functions of Institutional Repositories

(Reinforcing content registration)

As the challenges in the development of institutional repositories, the most important task is the increase of deposited content. The content is deposited primarily by library staff with cooperation from departments and researchers, and the deposit of content is basically done by each researcher who exercise the right of “self-archiving”. Universities and other institutions have devised various ways of reducing the burden of researchers. One example is a system in which library staff handles the rest of the work on behalf of researchers. Other examples include linking of research results to a researcher database published by the university. It is also important to share these systems.

(Enhancing awareness among universities and researchers)

Universities and other institutions need to assist researchers in understanding that registration of their research results in open access institutional repositories is beneficial to researchers themselves because it facilitates searches by domestic and international audiences, and assists distribution of information. At the same time, researchers should be reminded that making their research results open access leads to the fulfilment of the university’s duty of returning scientific information to society.

It is also important to clarify that the institutional repository is a function of disseminating information, which universities and other institutions need to make a concerted effort to improve.

(Incorporation into evaluation)

It is important to put effort into information dissemination via institutional repositories as a subject of evaluation in institutional certified evaluation systems, and to understand and publicise the status of such endeavours. It is also important to include information dissemination efforts as one of the evaluation points when universities evaluate achievements of individual researchers.

(Types of information to be registered)

It is important to pay attention to the uniqueness of information as the universities and institutions prioritise the content to be registered in institutional repositories, focusing on unique resources owned by each university and institution, as well as resources that are difficult to distribute through other systems. Based on information strategies and improvement policies, the universities and institutions should decide what types of content to cover intensively and comprehensively, as well as whether they should be open access as they try to enhance and disseminate the content.

(Courses of action for support)

It is necessary to urge academic societies to promptly consider and publicise their copyright policies. At the same time, it is necessary to enhance services that will help strengthen information dissemination capacities and operational systems, including the active deployment of the NII's shared repository, and sophistication and standardisation of the functions of the institutional repository software.