Kazuhiro Hayashi
(The Chemical Society of Japan,
The Steering Committee of International Scholarly Communication Initiative)
● Introduction
Since the time when Gutenberg invented the printing press and started large-scale printing of the Bible in 1445, printed books or booklets became the common and most popular tool to disseminate information. Over the subsequent centuries the distribution system for printed publications, including the postal system, has developed greatly. But the Internet has wholly changed our communication and information systems. As everyone knows, the information you would like to convey can be read by anyone who can access the Internet providing that it is put on the server and placed within search engines. The Internet, which originated in academic research, has been utilized since the early stages of electronic scholarly journal publishing. Now, most electronic journals produced by major commercial publishers are published on the web prior to appearing in print. Even the journals without a print version have been increasing. Most of the digital-only journals are newly launched academic journals, but recently some well established journals such as those published by the American Chemical Society stopped publishing the print edition. Moreover, video-only journals have already appeared, which cannot be printed.
The introduction to this article beginning with the history of electronic journals may be embarrassing. The electronic journal is, however, the essential precondition for Open Access (OA). Open access was an impossiblity when information in print format was distributed through the postal system, as the costs increase proportionate to the number of books or booklets published and mailed. Indeed, the information business on the Internet still remains challenging and even major American newspapers are in the process of trial and error. In point of fact, the construction and maintenance of a billing system for e-journal subscriptions is troublesome. If you adopt OA and put information on the web for nothing, you do not need to pay for customer management or offer journals bundled as a package in order to raise sales productivity. OA also saves you the cumbersome chore of negotiating licensing contracts with each subscribing institution. You can also avoid using the payment system of a commercial credit company to charge on a per article basis.
It is certain that the above mentioned features of the academic communication infrastructure based on the Internet have enabled the OA movement to emerge, which promotes providing electronic journals at no charge. Looking at this background is important for understanding the differences between Japan and other Western countries with regard to OA publishing.
● Open Access for Researchers and Open Access for Society
The Open Access movement has spread as a reaction to the oligopolistic control of the market by major commercial publishers, the financial difficulty many libraries face because of chronic subscription cost increases and budget cuts, and a public demand for accountability for government funded research. I am not going to introduce here the arguments and reviews already sufficiently covered by librarians and other stakeholders on this movement in Western countries. There is, however, one point that needs to be emphasized. Open Access for researchers and access for society at large are different things. The latter is sometimes called Public Access. A good example of this is the OA policy of the US National Institute of Health (NIH), which NIH itself defined as a “Public Access” policy. It is one way to provide social accountability for tax payers by publicly releasing medical research results. Another OA method has developed to address the serial crisis and reduce the gap between researchers in accessing research resources. Its aim is clearly different from Public Access and it is required for the promotion and development of science. In principle, from the point of view of scholarly society publishing, priority should be given to OA for researchers.
● Features of Open Access in Japan
Although it is not well known, Open Access is very popular in Japan. There are many scholarly societies that offer electronic journal access free of charge on the Internet. For example, since the electronic journal platfom of the Japan Science and Technology Agency, J-STAGE was started in 2000, more than 600 journals have joined. About 76% of those journals offer electronic journals access free of charge (See Figure 1 & 2). Their titles are included in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and fall into the category of full Open Access, in other words, “Gold Route OA.” Japan would thus be ranked at the top if one were to calculate the number of OA journals by country.
It must be mentioned, however, that most of these journals adopted OA not because it would be positively viewed, but for several other reasons. For example, the publication workflow of some scholarly societies remains unchanged from the print format publication, and they are not able to implement a billing system on the web. Other societies aim to raise their impact factor (IF), which is a measure reflecting the visibility of their journals. In fact the theoretical background of Open Access in Western countries that brought about the Budapest Declaration does not exist here. Many Japanese scholarly societies have no choice but to adopt OA. As of July 2010, the website of NII-ELS hosted by the National Institute of Infomatics, offered articles from 7,092 electronic journals, most of them scanned from printed journals and accessible. Of these, 3,237 were released as open access and free of charge to the public.
Japan is ranked second to the U.S. as of June 2010 in the number of institutional repositories (IRs). The institutional repository serves as a critically important support for the OA movement. In Japan more than 900,000 articles are accessible in IRs. Sufficient amounts of scholarly information through the “Green Route” (where the author archives on the web the final version of his/her peer-reviewed research paper that has been accepted for publication) have accumulated. One of the distinguishing features of the Japanese OA movement is the well-developed institutional repository activity. The present challenge is how to improve the quality of IR content and how to provide truly useful solutions for researchers. It is worth noting that new journals have started in connection with university bulletins, which are archived in their IRs. Further cooperation between university presses and IRs can be expected. (Figure 3)
There are some Japanese publishers that follow the OA publishing style of Western countries. In 2005, the English journals of The Chemical Society of Japan adopted the model whereby the publisher offers an open access option under a hybrid scheme—popular among major Western publishers. The Physical Society of Japan and The Japan Society of Applied Science also adopted this model in 2008. In 2007, The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers made its English version online-only access free of charge on the condition that the author pays from 20,000 to 40,000 yen per article. The National Institute for Material Science completely converted its journal, Science and Technology of Advanced Materials (STAM) into an OA publishing model in 2009, and assumed all the costs.
In short, while there have been a few electronic journals using pricing models for subscription and a few publishers who sell bundled e-journal packages, the OA model is popular in Japan.
● Dilemma of Scholarly Societies：in Western Countries and Japan
Table 1: Platform and Subscription Models of the Top 20 Electronic Journals in the Eigenfactor Database
Because scholarly societies are not for profit organizations, some people insist that all should adopt an OA publishing model. It is difficult to reject the original idea of the OA movement that there should be free online access to publicly funded research results. Moreover, from an operational perspective as discussed for electronic journals above, disseminating information free of charge is easier than constructing and operating a billing system for subscription on the web. But in a capitalistic economy, commercial publishers must pursue profits to generate shareholder value. They therefore bundle journals in the form of the Big Deal. Considering their essential role, scholarly societies as not-for-profit entities have no reason to reject OA publishing. In Western countries, however, most of the major scholarly societies publishing well-known journals are reluctant to convert them to OA, with the exception of a few newly launched titles. The reason is that not only commercial publishers but also the publishing departments of major scholarly societies adopt subscription pricing models to generate a profit. For example, societies for physics and chemistry earn 70-80% of their income from their publishing enterprise. They use this revenue to maintain other academic activities including education. Therefore, the issue of open access cannot be limited to purely article publishing. Societies have own their financial reasons for choosing whether to adopt an OA model.
In contrast, many Japanese scholarly societies have already adopted their own OA model for their journals. They have nothing to lose, and in this sense Japan is in a better position than Western countries in the age of OA.
The situation in Japan is not as simple as it seems, however. Most publishing departments in Japanese scholarly societies still operate on a conventional print-oriented workflow. There are few societies that have begun to invest in the conversion to electronic journal service that has developed in Western countries. Failing to adjust to the paradigm shift in the new information communication technology, Japanese scholarly publishing is finding it difficult to take a lead in this area. In the first place, if a journal desires to become useful and influential by converting to OA, we should expect to see an increase in the visibility of Japanese academic journals much more than we have to date. I analyzed the journals published in Japan that are found in Thomson Reuter’s Journal Citation Report to determine whether they charge for the electronic version and whether charging affects their IF. Comparing these journals using only Ifs is not useful because they represent different research fields. I therefore used the Eigenfactor score that corrects for research field variations to examine the journals ranked in the top 10 (200 journals in total). Among these there were only three OA journals. Even among the journals ranked in top 20, there were only seven OA journals. This means that many well-established journals published in Japan have adopted the subscription model. See Table 1 for the actual status of Japanese scholarly society publishing.
● The Problem of OA Publishing Does Not Rest in OA.
The most critical challenge for the OA movement in Japan is the need to improve the quality of research publications. It is, of course, very important to fulfill our social accountability by providing information to taxpayers through OA or the Public Access system. What is more urgent now is to make OA resources the dominant means of communication for researchers. Although the OA movement has taken the strong ideological stance that Open Access is a common good, we should not assume that the value of the information is enhanced if it is accessible free of charge. Rather, it is better to assume that the valuable information becomes more meaningful by being provided through OA.
In order to collect valuable information it is absolutely necessary to actively encourage researchers to submit papers. A scholarly journal should have a chief editor who provides strong leadership for the mid- and long term. The journal should also have active contributing editors and supporting staff. It would be ideal if such a journal adopts OA as its strategic policy. Indeed, some predecessors and successful examples like J-HEP and Optic Express have sound editorial systems and dedicated staff. Scholarly societies themselves should assume the important role of leading the publishing operation for their community’s research. In addition, institutional repositories as transmitters of academic information face similar challenge as journal publishers.
It is necessary for the OA movement and research activities in Japan to return to the original meaning of information communication and publishing. In other words, what information we wish to send, to whom we wish to send it, and how efficiently we do it. These questions remain essentially the same as in the print-dominated age. Japanese scholarly societies, being less restricted by the subscription-pricing model, should take advantage of every opportunity. I hope that such experiments will produce the Japanese model of OA publishing, which may even ensure that Japanese publishing activities will have a major impact on international scientific research.
Acknowledgements: I would like to express my gratitude for the cooperation of NII and JST.
Reference
Kazuhiro, Hayashi. Nippon no Open Access Shuppankatsudo no Dokobunseki. (in Japanese) Joho Kanri. vol. 52, no. 4, 2009, p. 198-206.
|
CONTENTS
TOP
Figure 1: Transition of Scholarly Societies and Journals Joining J-STAGE
Figure 2: Access Authentication of J-STAGE Journals
Figure 3: Transition of Open Access Institutional Repositories and the Contents in Japan