Yukinori Okabe
(Graduate School of Library, Information and Media Studies, University of Tsukuba)

I am just an ordinary graduate student. I spend my time hovering around Library and Information Studies, picking up topics that might be interesting and inspecting them, then studying them if I like the look of them, or tossing them aside if they seem out of my league.

Open access is an area with which I am not very familiar. Thanks to a fellow graduate student who is always enthusing about OA and institutional repositories, I did have a sense that there were some potentially interesting hot issues involved, but that was about all I knew. Personally, I like to poke around in the information science of the 1980s, rehashing the past, studying events and phenomena in hindsight to see what was going on at the time. The present progressive tense scares me off. The fact that my research seminar is in Sociology/History of Thought probably has something to do with it, or maybe it’s just plain cowardice. In any case, I arrived at the 5th SPARC Japan Seminar with not much more than a vague idea of the importance of information-gathering.

As it turned out, though, I was fascinated from start to finish. I ended up feeling oddly resentful toward my friend, the OA enthusiast: if he was onto such an interesting subject, why didn’t he proselytize more? Ms. Charlotte Hubbard of BioMed Central explained the business model in a way that even a layman like me could follow. The full details can be found on several blogs, but I’d like to note a particularly interesting point, which was her emphasis on changes in the way content is provided as the medium changes. Just as music has shifted from records and CDs to iPods, for scholarly information we have the transition from paper media to web-based communication. This recalls McLuhan’s well-known thesis that the forms of media define their content, but it adds another facet. I was especially struck by the peer-review cascade. Allowing peer-reviewed journals within the same portfolio to transfer submissions sequentially, from the flagship journal to those with lower rejection rates, gives researchers the chance to submit a paper once and have it accepted by a peer-reviewed journal somewhere along the line, while it saves the editors the cost of repeated reviews. This solution seems like a happy marriage between researchers, who don’t like demands on their time, and publishers, who don’t like costs. It is indeed an egg of Columbus. I wish such journals existed in my own field.

Prof. Shin Tochinai of Hokkaido University’s Graduate School of Science gave a very interesting lecture. The video is available online, and I hope you will watch it and share the excitement. His stories made me want to grab the people I know in Philosophy of Science or Science and Technology Studies by the scruff of the neck and make them listen—stories about how, in the old days, you had to visit famous professors to ask them for reprints, or how a world authority on bees at Hokkaido University used to publish nearly all his work in the departmental bulletin. There’s a rule of thumb that says it’s hard for the next generation to find out information like this, which isn’t written down because everybody took it for granted a generation ago. Such stories can be told only by someone like Prof. Tochinai, who has been in the forefront of his field for years. The “science kid” in me was having a ball the whole time he was speaking. Incidentally, on a separate trip I met the Hokkaido University librarians and learned that many consider themselves “Tochinai fans.”

Throughout the SPARC seminar, for some reason, Gutenberg’s portrait kept coming to mind. I’m currently into the history of reading, and I often indulge in idle speculation about things like the meaning of reading and the diffusion of knowledge in society. So here I was, at a cutting-edge seminar on scholarly communications … being reminded of the distant past? I kept grinning away at the thought. The friend sitting next to me must have felt quite uncomfortable. Be that as it may, in the history of reading, it is often said that the world became a happier place as a result of the printing press disseminating knowledge, transmitting knowledge to ordinary people. The discussion after the lectures focused mainly on financial aspects, but when it occurred to me that there is an unspoken, self-propelled phenomenon going on behind all this, I thought I would turn into the Cheshire cat. The OA movement may have begun as a response to the practical problem of soaring e-journal prices, but it has led to no less than the low-cost dissemination of knowledge, thus repeating past events on a vaster scale. It’s a revolution, an all-out revolution. Some say that Newton’s famous reference to “standing on the shoulders of giants” was actually a dig at a scientific rival who was a short man, but I felt as if I’d been a witness to the moment when those giants slowly began to move. I’m delighted at my good luck in being able to enjoy an era of cataclysmic change, and I’m also wondering whether I shouldn’t become a missionary and go around telling people to sit up and take notice, because a situation as interesting as the great change now under way in scholarly information probably occurs only once in several hundred years.

Chie Yamazaki
(Scholarly Information KAKARI, Library of the Graduate School of
Human and Environmental Studies and the Faculty of Integrated Human Studies,
Kyoto University)

In the social sciences, it can be difficult to determine precise bibliographic data for papers. I am reminded of how, when I tell my information retrieval classes to look up “reliable previous studies” by turning first to reference works (encyclopedias) and then to CiNii, humanities students who were past masters at finding things in reference works begin to struggle when it comes to CiNii searches, while for science students the reverse is true and they soon find every paper they want. In my own area, Interlibrary Loan (ILL), I always start by identifying an article’s bibliographic data and searching for an online version. These days it can be quite perturbing not to find the data on the web, and so it is reassuring to have CiNii. If the metadata, at least, can be located, one will be able to find one’s way to the resource, and thus, in the end, to the previous scholarship. As Associate Prof. Ikki Ohmukai, who manages CiNii, likes to say, in a society where “things might as well not exist if you can’t see them,” one of his missions is “to get people to look at things.” The clear upward trend in CiNii’s usage statistics over the last few years, thanks to their publishing the metadata of articles, enabling Google searches, and redesigning the site, is evidence that papers are utilized when they are placed in a good environment. I look forward to CiNii’s next big step: strengthening author searches by checking against IDs used in the Kakenhi database and enhancing user participation with the aim of linking people via their papers.

There are three likely reasons for the slow progress in putting social science journals online:
1．the decline in subscriptions and publishers’ incomes
2．the complexity of obtaining copyright permissions
3．the fact that articles may subsequently be published in book form
　. (at which stage, prior accessibility of an online version will cause loss of earnings)

The first point is an issue for all online journals, in the physical sciences as well as the humanities, but Sophia University’s Monumenta Nipponica is a case that gives cause for optimism. Although they lost 55 institutional subscribers when they moved online, the electronic journal subscriber database Project MUSE distributes 70 percent of monies as revenue to the publishers, and Sophia University currently receives $23,000 annually by this route—a solid income stream., One’s first thought as a librarian is to attract journals to one’s institutional repository, but I also felt that, when proposing to the faculty that our own journals go online, it would be a good idea to include a revenue-producing option like this (although the soaring prices of e-journals remain a concern).

In regard to the digitization of journals in Japan, Prof. Kate Wildman Nakai made a very interesting point when she urged a greater focus on arrangements for incoming journals. The small number of subscriber institutions can hinder the outward transmission of information as well as its reception. But subscriptions are not cheap. It is essential that universities and research institutes form alliances to negotiate discounts on a consortium basis. At the seminar, the hope was expressed that SPARC would perform a guiding role in this respect.

Prof. Matori Yamamoto’s report focused on copyright. As a proponent of the “commons” approach to scholarly information exemplified by institutional repositories, he said that the areas where this approach clashes with the paid model had caused him much soul-searching. In Japan, authors of articles in social science journals usually retain copyright. In these fields, especially, there is a chance that an article may subsequently be published in book form, and the permissions process becomes complicated if the author does not hold the copyright. However, copyrights held by authors can also be an obstacle to putting the journals themselves online.

The Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology (JASCA) decided at a general meeting that, while authors hold the copyright of articles in the Japanese Journal of Cultural Anthropology, JASCA retains the right to publish by electronic media. This has the incidental advantage that JASCA can handle requests for reprints and translations of articles whose authors are untraceable. At present, all back issues are accessible online without restriction, and the most recent year’s issues are available via NII under a paid model.

This example, where online access to back issues was decided at a single stroke by a general meeting, led to lively discussion. Personally, I tend to take a cautious attitude for fear of infringing the author’s right of public transmission, which under Japanese copyright law governs the right to distribute the material online, and also for fear of the permissions work necessary for figures and photographs, which may be original works in a different sense from the text of an article. However, many positive opinions were voiced by researchers in the audience, such as “It’s a shame when public access is denied because of hesitations over copyright,” and “There’s much to be said for going ahead and providing unrestricted access.” We also heard about the case of a publisher (the National Museum of Ethnology) which seeks to provide partial access by means of meticulous permissions work. After the seminar, I asked the opinion of the head of Kyoto University’s institutional repository, who reported having had many experiences like those discussed, in which, after all the necessary permissions had been carefully pursued, some figures ultimately had to be omitted from the online version. While this is undeniably a gray zone, clearly we must be willing to try every avenue and make every effort to facilitate scholarly communication by providing access to as many documents as possible.

Hisako Kikui
(Society for Biotechnology, Japan)

The joint promotion program for chemistry journals, which began in 2007 with five SPARC Japan partner journals and two journals of the Chemical Society of Japan (CSJ), aims to introduce scientific information originating in Japan by taking exhibition booths at international conferences (see “Joint Promotion of Journals, Mainly in Chemistry,” in SPARC Japan Newsletter No.1). Until now, these conferences had all been overseas, in the United States, Europe, and China, but as the program entered its third year with nine chemistry-related journals on board—six SPARC partners, the two CSJ titles, and Forum: Carbohydrates Coming of Age (FCCA)—we tried adding an international conference held in Japan. We chose the 9th Asia-Pacific Biochemical Engineering Conference (APBioChEC’09), which took place at the Kobe International Conference Center on November 24–28, 2009.

APBioChEC is a biennial international conference hosted by Asia-Pacific countries with the aim of stimulating education, research and development, and economic activity in the region through information exchanges and cooperation among researchers in biochemical engineering. The 9th Conference, on the topic “Biotechnology for Sustainable Development,” drew 545 participants from 18 countries, including Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand; overseas participants accounted for 266 of the total. There were eight plenary lectures, 141 oral presentations, 375 poster presentations, and five seminars. The next conference will be held in Shanghai in 2011.

A number of Japanese societies in the biotechnology field were represented on the APBioChEC’09 Organizing Committee, including several that had journals in the joint promotion, namely, the Society of Chemical Engineers, Japan (Division of Biochemical Engineering); the Society for Biotechnology, Japan; the Japan Society for Bioscience, Biotechnology, and Agrochemistry; and the CSJ (Biotechnology Division). Because of these close connections, many researchers whom we see frequently at academic society events dropped by the booth, and when we explained the purpose of the promotion they aided our publicity efforts by bringing foreign colleagues over to visit us, or walking around with our eco tote bag featuring the journal covers prominently displayed. The tote bag, produced and paid for by several of the participating societies, was handed out with these sponsors’ pamphlets, flyers, and sample journals inside. We also obtained permission from the organizers to distribute them at the poster presentation venue, where many students attending from overseas browsed through the sample journals and gladly accepted bags containing journals in their field of interest. At exhibitions in China, the sample journals go like hot cakes. Students from Asian countries, in particular, seem to have little exposure to Japanese journals, and we should therefore make the most of the opportunity afforded by international conferences in this country to inform them about these publications, thus helping to make Japan the hub of Asia for outgoing scientific information.

I had several conversations with people who had submitted papers to journals in our display and with overseas attendees who were thinking of submitting in the future. In publishing, one’s contacts with contributors are mostly via e-mail or the electronic submissions system, and one tends to concentrate on systematically putting the files through the review and publication process, but these encounters made me aware that there is a flesh-and-blood author on the other end, eagerly awaiting the outcome of the review. I look forward to the day when the Korean students who stopped in a group to listen to our presentation become authors of ours.

Being on the spot at the venue also brought various issues to light. Although “chemistry journals” can be considered a single category, not every title will be of interest at a given conference, and some of the samples were picked up less often than others. Nevertheless, a certain number of titles are needed to make the booth itself stand out. It might be a good idea to vary the emphasis of the promotion to suit the occasion, e.g., by displaying the most relevant journals in the front. Also, a staffer from one society cannot give a detailed answer if asked about the annual number of submissions or the rejection rate of another society’s journal; thus, it might be well to prepare explanatory materials in advance for the use of those on duty.

Hearing Japanese researchers say they hadn’t known there were so many journals in this country, I had the feeling that there is ample room for more publicity at home. Also, a young researcher commented, “I worry that Japanese journals may not be strict enough as most of the referees are Japanese. I sometimes prefer to submit work that I feel sure of to a high-level American or European journal because I want a rigorous review.” Promotions addressed to overseas researchers should not only present the journals as an attractive place to publish, but should also be conducive to bringing in high-quality referees from all over the world. Japanese researchers, for their part, need to understand and take pride in the fact that having the top journals in Asia—the world’s next growth zone—is important to Japan’s future.

Promotional activities at international conferences in Japan have the advantage that they can reach both overseas and domestic researchers at once; also, since traveling distances are short, the booth can be manned by staff from several journals on a daily roster. As we continue our overseas promotions, I hope that, in parallel, there will be more chances to exhibit at international conferences in Japan.

We are grateful to the staff of NII, the SPARC Japan secretariat, and the academic societies concerned for all their hard work and support in making this joint promotion possible. We would like to thank Standpoint Consulting (Tokyo) for their assistance in setting up the booth and production of the eco tote bags. We would also like to express our appreciation to the APBioChEC’09 committee for providing us with this promotional opportunity and for taking care of arrangements at the venue.