### 3. Establishment of Open Access to Results of Research Funded by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research and Other Competitive Funds

### a. Necessity of Open Access

Results of scientific research are preferred to be shared as intellectual assets of all humankind in the first place. In particular, the results of publicly funded research should be widely accessible and available by the public. On this recognition, the current global trends are towards the promotion of open access that makes research results accessible, arguing against the situation where journal articles are increasing hard to have access to on account of ever more expensive subscription fees and ever stronger copyright protection. The establishment of open access are also promoted in the Fourth Science and Technology Basic Plan.

### b. Ways of Establishing Open Access

There are two main ways of making research results open access. One is to publish papers in open access journals; the other is for researchers themselves to make their papers accessible online with the permission from the copyright holders, themselves included.

## (Publication in open access journals)

- There are still only a limited number of open access journals in Japan, given that to make open access possible, researchers have to be strongly motivated to submit and publish their articles in spite of the burden of publishing fees and that such a situation is naturally anticipated in which some journals might cease to be able to guarantee the quality and quantity of published articles in the consequence of changing the business model from subscription to open access.

- However, the fact that there are online journals such as the mega-journals like PLoS ONE, published in the US, has led the Working Group to propose that, in the remodelling of the GiA-PSRR-SP category, a special provision should be made to promote open access journals.

It is important for the funding agencies to unequivocally inform researchers, with the intention of discouraging them from avoiding submission to open access journals, that the financial costs incurred on the part of researchers, including publication fees, can be paid with the funds they award them. Incidentally, such payment for publication for research results is explicitly allowed in the current practice of GiA, and described in the Handbook and other documents and manuals.

(Publication on the internet)

Ways in which researchers make their publication public are characterized by the combinations of the elements in the three following viewpoints:

(1) Place

• On the website of the funding agency that awarded the grant which made the relevant research possible

• On the website of the institution the researcher is affiliated with

• On the website the researcher hosts

(2) Timing

At the time point when the result is published for the first time

(3) Content

- Content finally accepted and officially published by the journal (publisher's version, or the version of record)

- The author's final draft and other drafts

- In Japan, it is considered to be realistic to take advantage of "institutional repositories" as a vehicle for shifting to open access, owned by universities and other institutions.

Negotiation should take place with society and commercial publishers who hold copyrights with a view to making the timing as early as possible and the content as close as the version of record. It is also important to encourage researchers to actively take part in open access.

### c. Other General Improvements

☐ Funding agencies should require researchers to report to them the method of access to the results of the funded research, including its open access availability, as they need to in control of the relationship between funding and its consequences.

The research results report form of a Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research has fields in which researchers fill with the web addresses and DOIs of their research articles. The registry of this information should be strongly encouraged so that research results could be widely available through the links from within KAKEN (Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research Database).