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活動状況/イベント参加報告

Minako Nishiura
(Graduate School of Library, Information and Media Studies, University of Tsukuba)

Before attending “Work and Management of Academic Societies,” I knew next to nothing about the subject. I was aware, of course, that an academic society is “a place where people engaged in scholarship and research publish their findings, and where the scientific validity of those findings is examined and debated in an open forum,” as one of the speakers put it, but I had no idea or image of the actual work they do behind closed doors. I have to admit that, on the way there, I was far from confident that I would be able to understand the lectures with so little background, but my worries vanished as soon as Ms. Yuko Nagai began to speak. She explained the current situation and underlying context of academic societies so clearly and candidly that I felt as though, in a mere twenty minutes, I had been given something of a virtual tour of the problems that academic societies are facing.

Listening to Ms. Nagai, and to Ms. Katsumi Hashimoto of the Japan Epidemiological Association, Mr. Kei Mizuhashi of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, and Mr. Kazuhiro Hayashi of the Chemical Society of Japan, I was surprised at how concretely each of them described their work. I imagine it took courage to perform this task in front of an audience that represented the library and publishing professions, among others. But I also had the feeling that the future of academic societies and related bodies may depend on just such courage and decisiveness. One of the issues that all the speakers discussed was the future of journals as they move from print to online formats, a problem whose implications extend beyond academic societies alone. It is an issue that should concern anyone who has a point of contact with academic societies; indeed, the societies can hardly be expected to grapple with it as a purely internal matter.

To tell the truth, I had not anticipated that, in just a couple of hours, an unknown world would be made so real to me that I could more or less visualize it. Perhaps, to someone truly knowledgeable, the amount I learned hardly counts as knowing anything, but by the end I had a vastly broader horizon than I started with and my thoughts were turning to the future of academic societies. Sending out information which only those directly involved can know and sharing it with people in different positions expands their field of view and creates links of empathy between them. It is exhilarating to think that, little by little, this could become a force for change.

I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to all of the speakers for their invaluable talks.


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Date
Place
Topic
Speakers (titles omitted)
2010
Thurs.,
Sept.16
Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Kyoto University
4th SPARC Japan Seminar 2010
“Towards a Digital Mathematics Library”
(RIMS Workshop)

Sponsor: Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Kyoto University
Cosponsor: SPARC Japan
Koichi Ojiro
The University of Tokyo Library System

Yoshiaki Takai
Information Initiative Center, Hokkaido University

Hiroaki Wagatsuma
Department of Brain Science and Engineering, Graduate School of Life Science and Systems Engineering, Kyushu Institute of Technology

Yukinobu Koyama
World Data Center for Geomagnetism,Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University

Fri.,
Sept. 24
Komaba Campus,
The University of Tokyo
5th SPARC Japan Seminar 2010
“A Look Ahead to the Next Decade of Scholarly Communications in Japan”
(81st Annual Meeting of the Zoological Society of Japan)

Sponsor: The Zoological Society of Japan Cosponsor: SPARC Japan
Kazuhiro Hayashi
Publication Department, The Chemical Society of Japan

Koichi Ojiro
The University of Tokyo Library System

Ken-ichi Ueda
Institute for Laser Science, University of Electro-Communications

Panelists:
Tetsuya Suzuki
Kyoto University Press
Naruya Saitou
National Institute of Genetics
Oct. TBA 6th SPARC Japan Seminar 2010
“Open Access Disseminated from Japan” Open Access Week (Oct., 18–24)
TBA
Mon.,
Nov. 8
and
Tues.,
Nov. 9
Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel, Baltimore, Maryland SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2010
Cosponsors: SPARC, SPARC Europe, SPARC Japan/NII
For further details, see http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/dr10
Early Dec. TBA 7th SPARC Japan Seminar 2010
“The Harvard Open Access Policies”
TBA
2011
Jan. TBA 8th SPARC Japan Seminar 2010
“Author IDs”
TBA

For the latest news of events, see the SPARC Japan website: (http://www.nii.ac.jp/sparc/en/event/