Mika Saito
(Tsukuba University Library)

Introduction

The Society Copyright Policies in Japan (SCPJ)1 is a project to create and publicize the Society Copyright Policy Database of Japanese Scholarly Societies (SCPJ Database), which was established for the purpose of upgrading and expanding the contents of institutional repositories in Japan, being built upon the results of a survey of Japanese academic societies about Open Access policies. The official name of this endeavor is the Copyright Management of Open Access and Self Archiving Project. It was July 2006 when the University of Tsukuba, Kobe University and Chiba University started the project hosted by the National Institute of Infomatics (NII). In 2008, the Tokyo Institute of Technology joined. SCPJ is therefore now run by these four universities.

The survey in which SCPJ has its origin was carried out in 2005 by the Japan Association of National Libraries Digital Content Project (DCP Survey).2 After three years since SCPJ began, it is now necessary to re-access our approach and direction. The purpose of this paper is to review the present condition of OA policies of Japanese academic societies, study the data acquired from the SCPJ database, and to use these results to evaluate the approach of SCPJ. Finally, we shall address the current challenges and future perspectives.

Outline and Characteristics of SCPJ Database

Table 1: Categories of Academic Societies OA Policies

Most of the authors whose articles are published in academic journals usually transfer the copyright to publishers (companies or academic societies). When the authors want to archive or deposit their published articles on their own websites or institutional repositories, they have to confirm the copyright policies of the publishers. In 2005, when NII began to encourage construction of institutional repositories in Japan, there had already been a pioneering project abroad, SHERPA/RoMEO3 run by the University of Nottingham where one can easily obtain the copyright policy information of publishers. But SHERPA/RoMEO covers mainly European and American publishers. To locate the copyright policies of Japanese academic journals, authors had to check them individually if they wanted to make their articles accessible on the Internet. Therefore in 2006, the SCPJ project started to build a database that provides information about the copyright policies of Japanese academic societies for easy use. The SCPJ database officially opened in March 2007, and stores the data harvested in both the DCP Survey and the additional survey carried out later.

On the SCPJ Database website one can find the OA policy of Japanese academic societies, either by the name of a society or a journal title. One can find this necessary information easily because it classifies academic societies and shows them with different colors representing their policies, like SHERPA/RoMEO.

The search result indicates not only the color representing the policy of the society, but also more detailed information including how, where, and when the article can be archived. This includes, for example, whether the post-print version can be used, whether the article can be archived or deposited on the author’s website, institutional repositories, websites of research funders, non-profit digital archives, whether there is a one-year embargo, whether prior approval is required, or whether the author must indicate the source. If the academic society has its own specific rules, they are provided in the remarks column.

There are two characteristics to note in the SCPJ database. The first is that it is based on the surveys covering almost all academic societies in Japan. The DCP survey included 1,730 societies in Gakkaimeikan directory 2004-2006.4 In 2006-2007, SCPJ carried out another survey to obtain the copyright policies of the 1600 societies that had not given clear answers to the earlier queries. We also sent the questionnaire to the 30 societies that were newly added to the Gakkaimeikan directory 2007-2009.5 In 2008, we accessed 1,800 websites of academic societies to determine whether they had set copyright policies. Among these, 124 societies provided OA policy information on their websites and we sent e-mails to obtain permission to include them on the SCPJ database. We also contacted the managers of institutional repositories to obtain information about the 260 academic societies that wished to display their OA policy on the SCPJ database. We continue to take surveys and get information or requests from those most familiar with these issues (e.g., institutional repository managers) to enlarge our database.

The second characteristic of the SCPJ database is the attitude of the academic societies that indicated that they had not yet set an OA policy and those that did not give any answer at all are both regarded as having a policy for the purposes of this study. In this case, the color gray is given on the SCPJ database (Table 1). This color is not used by SHERPA/RoMEO and is unique to SCPJ. In the DCP survey, almost half of the 1,730 societies responded, but 75% of these had either not set an OA policy or indicated that such a policy was under consideration. We decided to reflect such results with the color gray. In November 2007, all societies that had not yet responded were placed in this category. Since October 2009, you can search for the OA policies of 1,836 Japanese academic societies in on the SCPJ database.

The access log records of the SCPJ database in the last full year (from October 2008 to September 2009) document a stable number of accesses at an average of 28,000 per month. With the exception of those who accessed through search-engines, the major group of users (20%) accessed through Japanese universities (domain name, as. jp). These are presumed to be institutional repository managers who wished to learn the OA policies of content that researchers requested them to confirm.

Thus, the SCPJ database has become the essential tool for depositing digital content in institutional repositories, and it is the only tool that provides an overview of the OA policies of Japanese academic societies.

Trend of Japanese Academic Society OA Policies

Figure 1: OA Policies of Japanese Academic Society
Figure 2: Change of numbers of Academic Societies categorized as green, blue, yellow and white
Figure 3: Comparison of OA policy between Publishers and Academic societies

The pie graph (Figure 1) shows the percentages of OA policies where each color represents the different positions of academic societies recorded in the SCPJ database in October 2009. The 1,379 societies categorized as gray (including those that are reviewing, have closed the door, non-responders, or others), account for 75% of all societies. This indicates that there has been no improvement since the 2005 DCP survey.

The number of societies categoriezed as green, blue, yellow, and white shows a steady increase, however. It is noteworthy that the number of societies categorized as blue (those that permit archiving post-print) has increased. In the last year, 50 societies adopted an OA policy to permit the deposition of post-print articles. (Figure 2).

Figure 3 presents a comparison of the 457 Japanese academic societies on SCPJ database with the 632 publishers on SHERPA/RoMEO. The percentage of publishers who set their OA policies in some form (categorized as green, blue and yellow) is 61.0% in Europe and America, and 65.6% in Japan. It is clear that Japanese academic societies tend to permit archiving only post-print articles.

Current Challenges and Future Perspectives for SCPJ

The SCPJ project continues to survey the OA policies of academic societies in the gray category, and to encourage them to consider setting and stating their policies.

We had a meeting with the Japan Academic Association for Copyright Clearance (JAACC) to exchange opinions in August 2008, and agreed to continue holding meetings to share information. At the 4th Workshop of the Digital Repository Federation held in November 2008, we had a discussion panel with other stakeholders including JAACC, publishers and those in charge of copyright management to reenforce the importance of mutual encouragement and information-sharing. We used the opportunity to explain the aim and activity of the SCPJ project to the participants from academic societies who attended the Joint Meeting on Cooperation for Digitalization of Academic Journals, and to solicit their cooperation.

Our efforts have contributed to the steady increase of societies setting their OA policies. However, many others have not yet done so. Our approach has thus not yet succeeded sufficiently to encourge them to set policies.

We carried out another survey last January of 260 societies asking questions about institutional repositories and the SCPJ project, in addition to their views on setting OA policies. Ninety societies responded. Regarding their views on institutional repositories, 72 societies (78.2%) answered that their members had talked about it at meetings or in conversations, one third of whom had considered the topic on formal occasions such as in annual general meetings. It is clear that the concept of an institutional repository is familiar. Thirty-three societies (37.5%) had already set OA policies, although the SCPJ project had failed to register them in former surveys. Thirty-six societies (40.9%) answered that they often talked about an OA policy, but that they had dropped the issue because they did not know what it exactly was, or that they had done nothing because it had never been discussed. Moreover, some respondents expressed apprehension about depositing articles in institutional repositories. These included concerns that sales of their journals might fall or the print journals might be ignored (26.6%), or that articles might be illegally copied and distributed (20.2%). Regarding the SCPJ project itself, seventy-one societies (77.2%) answered that they had never heard about it before the survey.

These results suggest that the SCPJ project should now shift its emphasis from the “survey and publication of OA policies of academic societies” to the “cooperation for setting OA policies of academic societies”.

We propose the following two basic directions for future cooperation.

The first priority is to provide useful information so that academic societies can set their own OA policies. These societies are anxious and doubtful about making articles published in their journals available as open access because they do not yet fully understand the issues of copyright and can not predict how this will impact the management of their societies. It would be fruitful to interview the academic societies that have already set policy to permit archiving post-print articles, to obtain information about the process of policy making and the effects of their journal sales, and to show those predecessor cases for the purpose of encouraging other academic societies to consider developing policies. It would be also meaningful to analyze OA policies based on size of membership and research fields.

The second direction will be to gain greater recognition for the SCPJ project and database. The surveys tell us that SCPJ is not particularly visible to those who work for academic societies. It is therefore necessary to establish connections with academic societies and have more occasions to talk as a means to provide useful information and disseminate the SCPJ database. It would also effective to enhance the function of the SCPJ database by preparing a separate page with correct information about the OA policy of each academic society.

2009 should be a turning point of direction of activity for the SCPJ project, and at the same time a turning point as it is the last year for the second phase of the commissioned project. We are making steady progress helping academic societies with their policy making, and exploring a solid system to continue our activity over the long term.