First of all, I wish to express my deep and heartfelt condolences to all the victims of the recent Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. When I see the heartbreaking damage and the hardships that the survivors have to endure, I feel not only profound sympathy but also extreme admiration for their determination to renovate their towns and rebuild their lives.

During the two weeks immediately after the disaster, NII, despite having had no damage to its equipment or infrastructure, was forced to suspend its scholarly information services several times due to the scheduled power outages that were implemented in order to secure an adequate electricity supply. These suspensions eventually caused great inconvenience to our users. We sincerely apologize for this and want to assure users that we are reviewing our service system in order to find ways to cope with these kinds of interruptions.

The servers that provide NACSIS-CAT/ILL, CiNii, and other services are located at our data center in Chiba City. Since this area was subject to scheduled blackouts mandated by Tokyo Electric Power Company, six power outages occurred during the month of March. Although it is equipped with its own electrical generator, our data center was nevertheless unable to cope with the frequent power cuts given the unpredictability of fuel oil deliveries for the generator as a result of the earthquake.

NII takes some serious pride, however, in the fact that its network service was able to withstand the earthquake and continue operating. Despite a partial disconnection, there was no interruption of Internet service on the backbone network because we had already finished the switchover to the latest version of SINET4, which has a redundant configuration in the disaster area.

Since a stringent energy conservation regime is anticipated for the summer, we are considering reconfiguring the system based on the difficulties we experienced this time from the viewpoint of user convenience.

SPARC Japan, which was initiated in 2003, is also being called upon to move in new directions in terms of its activities. This is necessary in order to respond to recent, rapid changes in the external environment.

In the autumn of 2010, NII signed a comprehensive agreement of cooperation with the Japan Association of National University Libraries and the Private and Public University Library Consortium. Additionally, a new consortium called JUSTICE (Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources), was established, and it commenced operations on April 1st, 2011. Its primary objective is to facilitate activities for better use of e-resources, but we are confident that in the near future it will contribute greatly to the further revolution in scholarly communications including the strengthening of open access.

Since 2009, NII has been in the process of shifting the activities of SPARC Japan away from its position midway between university libraries and Japan’s academic societies, which execute scholarly publishing in Japan, to one that is more closely aligned with the former. The reasons behind this move include the fact that the issues now being dealt with are not ones that are amenable to purely technological solutions such as support for digitization; also, at the national level Japan is gradually shifting its policy toward open access; furthermore, the stakeholders are becoming much clearer, as the Science Council of Japan is showing signs of coming to grips with the problem of scholarly journals.

While all of this has been going on, it is extremely gratifying that in the spring of 2010, SPARC Japan has, among other things, been successful in mediating support from Japanese universities for arXiv.org, the preprint server for physics, mathematics, statistics, computer sciences, and related fields. Contributions from Japan are presently being sought by SCOAP3 in the area of high-energy physics, and we think it is important that we make a serious effort to achieve consensus on this issue.

The digitization of scholarly journals was the point at issue when SPARC Japan was launched in 2003. However, I think it is safe to say that at this point the technological difficulties have already been solved.

On the other hand, new strategic measures are required to provide every kind of digital information needed to sustain teaching and research at Japan’s institutes of higher education; above all, international coordination and cooperation are necessary.

SPARC Japan will continue to join hands with university libraries to promote and closely support institutional repositories, open access, and other activities to improve the quality of future scholarly communications, while maintaining close communication with learned societies.

We ask for your continued cooperation in these endeavors.