Tazuko Kobayashi
(Graduate School of Social Sciences, Hitotsubashi University)

The SPARC Japan Seminar “Social Sciences Journals Today: IRs, Copyrights, and E-journals,” on December 11, 2009, was, for me, a very timely and valuable opportunity, as I learned exactly what I needed to know for the work I am doing to help digitize the journals of the academic societies to which I belong. For the past three years I have been involved with the digitization of departmental bulletins and academic journals at CiNii. As my specialty is sociology, this work had raised questions for me about the best way to put social science journals online, and I was keen to hear in detail about previous examples.

The presentations were all of great interest. In particular, in describing the approach of the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology (JASCA), Prof. Matori Yamamoto clearly set forth the key issues in regard to copyright in social science journals, the question of the public nature of academic journals, and the relationship between an academic society’s management and its journal in the digital era. As a prior model of digitization of a social science journal, Prof. Yamamoto’s talk contained much food for thought.

For social science journals following the same path, JASCA’s experience as described by Prof. Yamamoto offers some very useful points of reference regarding the shift to copyright transfer and the consensus-building process required, how they handled back numbers, and their policy toward institutional repositories. In particular, although the latter have become widespread in the past few years at large universities with many graduate students, smaller universities have yet to take the first steps, and even the boards of academic societies are not very well informed about them. Yet a growing proportion of contributors to journals are graduate students at universities that have institutional repositories, and before submitting a paper, they sometimes enquire whether they will be able to deposit it. How to respond in such cases has become an urgent question for the journals, coupled with such issues as what form copyright should take in the digital era, and how to reconcile this with CiNii’s charges for access to recent journal contents. I would like to see the societies that I belong to take note of JASCA’s policy toward institutional repositories—namely, that the author may deposit a PDF file of the peer-reviewed final manuscript—as a concrete way of dealing with the question.

When Prof. Yamamoto spoke of the “commons” approach to scholarly content, She touched on an important point regarding the form that academic journals should take. While all involved should recognize that journals, as pathbreaking contributors to the advancement of knowledge, fill a social role that is public in nature, the academic societies also need to stay in operation and preserve their scholarly resources, and the “commons” approach highlights the fact that these two issues are not easily reconcilable and at times directly opposed. In particular, one thinks of the problems facing smaller societies: how to secure the membership fees that are the basis of their continued operation and serve their members while presenting their scholarly achievements to society, and, further, how to adapt to the digital era, in light of the fact that their journals depend on peer review by members and on an editorial board that essentially donates its services.

By way of examples, I would like to outline the present situation of the two journals with which I am personally involved. The first is that of the Japan Oral History Association (JOHA), an interdisciplinary society encompassing those fields that record and study the oral narratives known as “oral history” (fields such as history, sociology, cultural anthropology, and folklore). Established in 2003, JOHA is relatively young and small, with about 300 members. Its journal Nihon ōraru historī kenkyū (Japan Oral History Review) was launched in 2006 and went online at CiNii in 2008. All content, from the first issue onward, is now accessible to nonmembers for a fee, after a process was completed to gain the authors’ permission for access to back numbers. The association came into being at a time of new trends in scholarship, but its first concern has been to set its operations on a solid basis, and it viewed digitization as a way of facilitating this.

The other journal is that of the Japan Society of Lifology. Many unique scholars such as Wajiro Kon and Tsuneichi Miyamoto were involved in the Society’s founding in 1972. Its membership, about 500 at present, has been gradually declining in recent years. The Society is distinctive for its interdisciplinary scope, which spans many sectors of the social and physical sciences and even the arts—architecture, home economics, urban planning, cultural anthropology, sociology, history, design, social welfare, nutrition, demography, folklore, agriculture, environmental studies, and so on. Since 1996 it has published a journal, Seikatsugaku ronsō (Journal of Lifology), whose articles incorporate an abundance of nontextual data, such as illustrations and photographs of daily life. The journal is now in the process of being digitized, and we are searching for a concrete way forward while attempting to reconcile the “commons” approach to scholarly content, on the one hand, with the full utilization of the Society’s scholarly resources and its stable management on the other.

There are many small interdisciplinary associations in the social sciences. Increasingly, such groups are trying, through trial and error, to find dependable models and guidelines for adapting their journals to the digital era.