About Us
About Us
Overview

The International Scholarly Communication Initiative (SPARC Japan) is a project of the National Institute of Informatics for the academic community in Japan to promote open access, to encourage further distribution of scholarly information and academic resources, and to strengthen ability for dissemination of information, cooperating with domestic and international OA initiatives and organizations on the matters concerned.

Progress in the digitization of scholarly journals has stimulated a rapid change in the way research results are distributed; however, scholarly journals in Japan have not kept pace with this trend toward digitization and international distribution. The project was launched in 2003 through support by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and it encourages digitization of scholarly journals, especially English language journals published in Japan, with SPARC Japan Publishing Partners. Its goal was to keep in the hands of Japanese researchers the outstanding research results that they currently published abroad, to further promote international dissemination of research results, and to create a self-sustaining cost-recovery model that would enable stable transmission of Japanese scholarly journals and improve their name recognition overseas.

We have started phase 5 from 2016, and the basic policy is to promote open access and to encourage further distribution of scholarly information and academic resources, cooperating with domestic and international OA initiatives and organizations on the matters concerned. Especially, collaborating with SPARC, we will announce activities for open access in Japan to overseas. To promote open access, we seek to identify the issues and continue advocacy activities, pointing to enhance a sense of participation of librarians and researchers for encouragement of distribution of scholarly information and academic resources, while strengthening much more working with the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE) under the Cooperation Promotion Council which links between the National Institute of Informatics (NII) and university libraries and the Japan Consortium for Open Access Repository (JPCOAR).

  Phase 1 : 2003-2005
  Phase 2 : 2006-2009
  Phase 3 : 2010-2012
  Phase 4 : 2013-2015
  Phase 5 : 2016-2018
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Overseas

Initiatives have been developed in North America, Europe, etc., for the creation of competitive markets to resolve the problem of surging prices through support for the digitization of scholarly journals by researchers at the urging of university library organizations.


As a result, SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) are being developed in the U.S. and SPARC Europe activities likewise in Europe.


In addition, the open access movement, which seeks to provide unobstructed access to research results is also being developed centered in the U.S. and Europe, and activities involving government agencies, research assistance organizations and others are becoming more vigorous.


We strengthen collaboration with SPARC and SPARC Europe and support arXiv.org and SCOAP3 while participating in governance. We also support CLOCKSS in cooperation with the Japan Consortium for Open Access Repository (JPCOAR) and the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE). As above, we keep the activities moving forward in order to advocate further implementation of open access.

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Goals

(1)Cooperating with international OA initiatives
We participate in international initiatives and try to appeal activities and outcomes while playing a role as a secretariat in Japan. We gaze at international trends and correspond necessarily.


(2)Advocacy activities regarding distribution of scholarly information and academic resources
We continue advocacy activities so as to study issues related to open access, open science, and international publishing of academic society journals while working with other communities or organizations (such as the Cooperation Promotion Council which links between the National Institute of Informatics (NII) and university libraries).


(3)Expanding the scope of activities for open science
We realize timely information dissemination of domestic and worldwide trends in various disciplines like not only science and technology but humanities and social sciences, in order to deal with growing concern for open access of research outcomes, open data, which could be an infrastructure of innovation, and open education pushing reconsideration of basic elements in higher education. We promote strategic studies about activities for open science and research data management in university libraries.


(4)Gathering basic information regarding open access
To gather and assess basic and quantitative information concerning open access, the surveys on the state of scholarly information dissemination in Japan are conducted. We discuss that a library could play a certain role to gather and analyze data for studying research strategies in each university and research institution.

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Last updated: 2017/08/03