SPARC Japan NewsLetter No.11 conentsfeature articlestopicsactivty reports
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The Future of Institutional Repositories

Kazuo Yamamoto
(Hokkaido University Library)

● Introduction: Awareness of institutional repositories

JAIRO Cloud Community Site JAIRO Cloud Community Site
https://community.repo.nii.ac.jp/

Institutional repositories were taken up in Case Studies of Innovative Initiatives by University Libraries published in December 2011 by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. The 36 case studies are organized under seven categories including “Learning support” and “Research support (institutional repositories),” which accounts for five of the case studies. The annual University Ranking published by Asahi Shimbun has long included institutional repositories as one of its ranking items, showing the increase in public awareness.

The National Institute of Informatics JAIRO Cloud also began operation this fiscal year as a shared IR service. It provides a cloud-based institutional repository environment intended especially for those institutions unable to build and operate their own service. As of April 24, already 69 institutions are said to have applied for the service. A community site for information exchange has been set up as well (JAIRO Cloud Community Site: https://community.repo.nii.ac.jp/).

Institutional repositories in Japan have gone well beyond the infancy and early youth stages and are well into the stage of widespread acceptance. Last year Open Access and BOAI were in the spotlight as they celebrated their 10th anniversaries, and now 2012 marks the 10th year since the concept of institutional repositories came to Japan starting in Chiba University.

This would seem to be an excellent time to begin thinking about the next stage of development.

● Looking back in time: Confronting the rising price of journals, digital distribution of academic information, and BOAI

On the way to this milestone of building institutional repositories, three things that stick in memory are the price problem, digital archiving, and BOAI (Budapest Open Access Initiative). While these three topics are closely interrelated, in some senses they are also completely independent of each other.

1) Rising price of journals: Growth in volume of academic papers and irrationality of pricing

Around the turn of last century, against the backdrop of the growing number of newly founded universities and the start of so-called Big Science, as funding of science increased along with the participants, the number of academic papers grew exponentially (especially given the “publish or perish” mentality in the United States). Then when commercial publishers started getting into the business of journal distribution, the sale price of academic journals finally reached the point where it exceeded the buying power of the public. In the West, people started becoming aware of the “serials crisis” in the 1970s, while in Japan it did not emerge until 20 years later, with the number of university subscriptions to academic journals peaking in around 1990 and plunging sharply thereafter, as shown in the graph based on the results of a NACSIS-CAT data survey by Professor Akira Miyazawa (see figure 1 in http://www.scj.go.jp/ja/info/kohyo/17pdf/17_44p.pdf). Among reasons given for the time lag between Japan and the West are the oil crisis and bubble economy, but another trend of some interest is the arrival of the “publish or perish” slogan in Japan in the 1980s and the way the productivity of scientists became such an issue in the mass media.

The subscription model necessitates that when the volume of academic papers increases, the total volume of subscriptions must also increase. Recently Thomson Reuters announced the top ten for academic paper citations in 2011. While the top three papers were cited 564, 132, and 98 times, respectively, the top-cited paper itself contained 414 citations of other papers. If this kind of practice is going to be allowed, it seems only right that the cost burden for this practice also be accepted. Still, even without a case like the top-cited paper, academic information is essentially incapable of gaining large numbers of readers. With academic society journals, as long as papers are distributed to members in exchange for their membership fees there will be a balance between writers and readers. However, the moment someone tries to expand beyond that scope into a publishing venture, they run into difficulty. Expecting a large number of readers for the highly specialized content of academic journals shows a lack of business acumen. This is the contradiction at the root of the subscription model. While there are some publishers who have continued to raise prices on the grounds that superior editing means, “Our flagship publication is a magazine, not a journal,” ordinary journal publishers thinking of supporting this slogan will also have to think of some other ways of handling the costs involved.

A reason given also for maintaining the high prices is the lack of alternatives to academic papers. As long as scientists believe in the value of their own research work, they will not come to decide that any information will do if it can be obtained cheaply, and academic papers will not become a commodity. Rather there is a strong brand tendency behind the expectations for ample peer review of submitted papers. That is why the price irrationality, driven by the willingness to pay high prices if necessary, is likely to continue. It has also been pointed out that when MegaJournals came along, commercial publishers initially set their fees at around 3,000 dollars but they were forced to lower them after they were undercut by newer entrants into the market. While this came about thanks to scientists who welcomed the speeding up of the review process, the speed and low price inevitably mean a watering down of the review process, running counter to the original brand strategy. From the standpoint of quality assurance of research results reports, this is a matter for concern; but the phenomenon also merits attention in that a wide range of options are being provided.

2) Digital distribution of academic information: Who are the players?

Meanwhile the commoditization of the academic paper distribution environment is proceeding rapidly. Before the decade in which institutional repositories were built, journal editors changed publishers, and publishers consolidated printing houses, and went from one platform for e-journal provision to the next.

Even long before the past ten years, of course, digital technology made information distribution much easier; and it has come to be said that scientists are able to communicate academic information on their own. Yet this has not become widespread in practice. The reason is that since research activities are competitive, priority will be given to the pursuit of competitive superiority. It makes sense to put distribution in the hands of players who are good at distribution.

In the past, commercial publishers made major contributions to the development of e-journals; but today they are gradually losing their superiority. It has become easy for new players to enter the market, so that there is not even time to update the menu of new entrants, such as PLoS ONE and eLife. (This is something that comes up continually at SPARC Japan seminars.)

Libraries, of course, as traditional players also continue to hold a privileged position, starting with the Copyright Act. In Japan, in response to government budget requests for support of e-journals, assuming national, public, and private universities as a whole, expenses for e-journal introduction in national universities as “priming water” became a regular part of the government budget, as a specific measure corresponding to the four focus areas (life sciences, information & telecommunications, environmental sciences, and nanotechnology and materials science/technology) of the Science and Technology Basic Plan for Phase 2 (2001-2005); and financial support is now also being provided to other public and private universities. With this, e-journals have seen sudden growth.

3) BOAI: An economic model of Open Access

Even assuming that pricing is irrational from an objective standpoint, if we want to achieve greater efficiency it should be possible to maximize the effectiveness of individual scientists, who are the economic players here, if they freely allocate the financial resources they have for distributing academic information. If each research activity has its own intrinsic value, then maximizing the effectiveness of each scientist ought to be the best approach for now. APC (Article Processing Charge), in other words, is the best choice at this point in time as an economic model supporting Open Access. (At the same time, however, for young scientists for whom getting their papers published is a life-and-death matter, APC prices are still too high and have not yet reached the level where effectiveness can be expected. The scientists submitting to PLoS ONE, likewise, are mainly those who have been able to obtain funding. There is still a need for an effective reallocation model, in the same way as the subscription model was supported by subscription fees paid by research centers and universities.)

For research expenses, national universities had the “unit cost per professor” as basic income even prior to this past decade (though with the requirement that they work as instructors). While this applies only to instructors who have obtained tenure in the university, as a general principle, if basic income is provided, this means the government is monetarily supplying the minimum basic services guaranteed to citizens. The guarantee of the right to know, as with public libraries, will also likely be reconsidered. Whether there is a causal relationship or not, it is hard to deny the empirical and intuitive sense of a growing tendency among scientists, blessed with ample funds, not to make use of university libraries; and arguments that they are no longer needed are not unheard of. There are no actual cases, however, where a basic income has been permanently implemented in ordinary society. Claims that it would be difficult to come up with the funding with the free market system cannot be brushed aside (and in fact, research funds are always in short supply). Given that sources of funding are not inexhaustible, it is necessary to supplement them with some mechanism that, in addition to individual efficiency, takes into account overall efficiency as well.

As to where to turn for this supplementation, the existence of the university as the main employer of scientists cannot be ignored. In its relationship with scientists, whose research work is based on the principle of competition, a university guarantees them lifelong employment as educators, while its existence as an organization functions as a guarantee of individual scientists to society. In its relationship with society, meanwhile, a university returns research results to society, educates successive generations of scientists, and contributes to lifelong learning. Considering how the research costs are procured in these relationships in the first place, the university's accountability to society is extremely important. One means for scientists to make known individual research results to society and ask for understanding would be for the university to collect and store these results and present them systematically. Besides the initial expectation of institutional repositories as making it easier to obtain the writings of scientists through Open Access, they can also be expected to function in a major way toward supporting universities in fulfilling this accountability to society.

● Current state of institutional repositories in Japan

Phase 2 of the Science and Technology Basic Plan was a major driving force toward the spread of e-journals in Japan. Judging from the cabinet decision of August 19, 2011, Phase 4 of this Basic Plan (2011 to 2015 fiscal years) is explicitly aimed at promoting both institutional repositories and Open Access. The stated promotion measures are as follows.


IV. 4. (3) Development of research information infrastructure <Promotional measures>

- The government will encourage universities and public research institutions to establish institutional repositories so that they may promote systematic collection, retention, and open access of education and research results, such as research papers, observations, and experiment data, by digitalizing them. The government will also promote electronic issuance of research paper journals published by academic societies and associations, and electronization and open access to literature and materials possessed by the National Diet Library and university libraries, including those on humanity and social science.
- The government will advance networking of digital information resources, standardization of data, development of basic information on the location of contents, and enhancement of the function to associate information, and then promote cross-disciplinary integrated search, structuralization, and automatic knowledge extraction. The government will also build a system for “knowledge infrastructure,” which enables integrated searching of and data extraction from all research information.
- The government will expect universities and public research institutions to consider effective measures for the efficient and stable subscription of electronic journals. The government will also support such efforts.

The direct reference to institutional repositories at the beginning of the above list of promotion measures is worthy of note. Read in the context of libraries, the second policy measure has to do with the long-standing issue of the relationship between digital information resources and the catalog location information service being promoted by the NII and participating institutions, while the third measure is about JUSTICE. With regard to these three points the government's awareness of issues is as indicated in the Basic Plan, and funding support is being provided either directly or through the NII. However, when it comes to initiatives carried out in cooperation among universities, the situation is quite different. The third measure was already put in place last year and has begun operating, while for the second the work on creating an organization has started. As for institutional repositories, cooperation across universities is taking place under volunteer groups consisting of some of the institutions, and those groups are involved in human resource development, forming direct cooperative relationships with overseas organizations, and reporting on current progress in Japan at international conferences and the like. For these government policy measures to be carried out and for universities to meet the expectations of citizens effectively along those broad outlines, the overall awareness of issues will need to be renewed.

● The future of institutional repositories

1) Connecting academic research results to society

An overview of the Science and Technology Basic Plan for Phase 4 is as given in section I (Basic Ideas). Along with the strong emphasis on the need for innovation measures, human resource development that was a focus of Phase 3 is now newly positioned as being responsible for this innovation; moreover, the importance of organizations supporting human resources is noted, as well as the commitment to creating these organizations together with society. Regarding the relationship to society, the World Conference on Science held in Budapest in July 1997 is introduced and is invoked in connection with the issue of governance.

While some scientists have pointed to differences from the Budapest Conference regarding the relationship to society, these can probably be explained as the difference in viewing two sides of the same coin from the government's standpoint or from that of universities. Regarding the position of institutional repositories, earlier we discussed the issue of university accountability to society in connection with the economic model. In addition, institutional repositories are fulfilling the role of further strengthening channels linking universities to society, as a new outreach suited to a networked society. In the case of the institutional repository of Hokkaido University, some 80 percent of accesses come via Google, as academic research results are being delivered beyond the existing circles of scientists. There are also lecture requests and mass media interviews coming about because of institutional repositories, which have become support measures meeting the needs of society.

2) The revolution in distribution of academic information

The initial role of institutional repositories was as a framework for institutional support of self-archiving by scientists, having been promoted as specific “green route” measures. The issues Open Access needs to address, however, are those with existing academic journals themselves. The green route, premised on maintaining the existence of those journals, does not offer a fundamental solution. Instead it will be necessary to choose the gold route.

Research bulletins, a particular Japanese feature, serve the educational function of enabling young scientists as well as students prior to launching their career as scientists to get their research results published. The papers in these bulletins make up a significant portion of institutional repository content. In the past, questions were raised about the quality of these papers; but there is now a trend toward more rigorous peer review of the bulletins, which go out under the name of the university, as part of growing university accountability.

It is also increasingly the case that institutional repositories, in cooperation with academic societies, are being used as a platform for academic journals. Hokkaido University has begun distributing the journals of local academic societies from its institutional repository, partly by way of regional contribution and cooperation. Elsevier once proposed a contract model on the analogy of attendance at baseball games. At the level of bleacher seat services, this could apply also to the current institutional repositories. Naturally institutional repositories will not remain forever as bleacher seats. In addition to support for researcher ID against the background of ReaD & Researchmap and the introduction of a handle system in many institutional repositories, they are also coming to support DOI against the backdrop of the Japan Link Center (JaLC) being promoted by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), while advancing in functionality and openness.

3) Tie-up with education

Hokkaido University Collection of Scholarly and Academic Papers Hokkaido University Collection of Scholarly and Academic Papers
http://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/index.jsp

Most institutional repositories are operated by libraries, which are good at structuring and systematizing knowledge in its original form through the processes of collecting, organizing, storing, and making it available. The service of structuring and systematizing the results of academic research, which is becoming more fragmented even as it becomes increasingly cross-disciplinary, is highly effective in terms of social accountability and education.

Hokkaido University is one of the schools that have started promoting open education through tie-ups and cooperation with various projects for introducing information technologies to education (OCW, academic affairs systems, management of educational materials/attendance/reports, e-Learning, TOEFL testing in a digital environment, departmental archiving and offering of content, etc.), and institutional repositories are a part of these efforts.

● In conclusion

Institutional repositories need to be deployed flexibly as situations change. Even while maintaining rules and principles, it is not necessary for them to be pigeonholed in a fixed framework or definition. Libraries, too, so long as service is the basis, rather than being established independently, must adapt to change as an ancillary facility of universities and as an organization in society. Just as libraries with respect to the materials they handle can never ignore the authors who produce them or the readers who use them, likewise institutional repositories are expected to take into account and work to improve the relationship to the various kinds of stakeholders involved with their contents.

Institutional repositories are full of numerous possibilities.