The seminar on February 3, 2011 was planned to learn recent trends related to Japanese articles ‘is the overseas outflow continuing?’ and Japanese scholarly journals -‘what is their current standing relative to foreign journals?’. For a quantitative analysis of these trends the collection of accurate data and the use of specialized techniques are indispensable, and there has probably been no more favorable occasion than this one to hear directly from two experts about their findings, and then for the participants to consider those results from their own perspectives. What made the seminar so fascinating and what made it attract such a large audience, I believe, was that it gave a realistic picture of Japanese views on the internationalization of Japan’s scholarly environment.

Benchmarking Scientific Research 2010
Bibliometric Analysis on Dynamic Alternation of Research Activity in the World and Japan

Approximately a million papers are published worldwide each year, and the number continues to grow. A work that looks at the number of articles and the impact of citations and classifies the total by country is published under the title “Benchmarking Scientific Research 2010.” An analysis of data for the past 30 years shows that the number of papers with international co-authors has climbed steadily to 200,000 and that Japanese articles account for 25 percent of them. As the structure of the worldwide network for research activities changes, the aggregate data and the distinctive trend in China of a jump in the rate of international co-authorships corroborate a phenomenon that scholarly activities are becoming interdisciplinary on the world stage. Since the creation of independent administrative institutions in Japan, universities and research institutes have been extensively carrying out similar kinds of quantitative analyses in order to understand the situation at and strengths of their own institutions, and as we learnt at Dr. Saka’s lecture, we are in a period when it is readily possible to make comparisons within fields and between institutions with regards to the number of articles in the top 10 percent in terms of the number of citations. Government expectations are also at stake, and those involved in evaluating, strategizing, and planning at places far removed from the research itself swing back and forth between optimism and pessimism. I understand that Europeans and North Americans carry out their own analyses based on their own analytical methods and incorporate them into research plans and rankings; in Japan, however, analysis has been limited to totaling up the number of articles and the number of citations and the impact of the citation and emphasizing where the strengths are. In that sense, the introduction of a visual science map that would go a step further than a one-dimensional aggregate analysis and add multifaceted studies and interviews with experts in the relevant fields would provide new perspective even to participants whose main business is research.

As a first attempt, Dr. Saka presented the results of an analysis of article output in Japan classified by organization. Depending on the field, the rankings of the number of papers published by national and private universities, by independent administrative research institutions, and by companies have changed places; in the field of engineering, the number of papers from companies has fallen by 7 percent since the latter half of the 1980s, but this has been replaced by an increase in papers from independent administrative research institutions and private universities, a change that can probably be said to reflect changes in the economy and government policy of Japan rather than changes in research trends.

A Bibliometric Analysis on the Status of Japanese Journals and Papers,
Focusing on the Trend of “Overseas Drain Ratio” of Japanese Papers

Discussion period (from front left: Ayaka Saka, Senior Research Fellow, National Institute of Science and Technology Policy; Masamitsu Negishi, NII Professor Emeritus; Jun Adachi, Professor, Director of NII Cyber Science Infrastructure Development Department)

Nearly 80 percent of Japan’s scholarly articles are not published in Japan but are in foreign journals instead. This was the finding of an article on the “overseas outflow rate” entitled “The controversial issue of bibliometric rankings in ranking research and the response of researchers” (Yakugaku toshokan [Pharmacy library], 49 [2004]: 176). Professor Negishi presented the latest data from a study that served as a follow-up to that article, focus on:

● The number of articles in major international journals classified by the country in which they were published and their distribution ratio

● The number of articles by Japanese researchers classified by the journals publishing them and the distribution ratio for the countries in which those journals were published

The substance of the lecture was extremely profound: it considered the impact of globalization on scholarly activities as well as the various circumstances that surround research nowadays and I believe that, was useful for the all the members of the audience–representatives from academic societies and publishing companies located in Japan, librarians and researchers alike.

As of the year 2000, 79.3 percent of Japanese articles (articles by authors affiliated with institutions that had a Japanese address) were published in foreign journals (journals in the database used for the classified total that were edited and published in countries other than Japan). The fact that Japanese articles constituted 12 percent of the world total and the overseas outflow rate for them was 80 percent was a “serious problem.” When classified totals of the global share of Japanese articles and journals were subsequently made, the rate peaked in 2001 at 80.6 percent and is now down again at around 79 percent. If one takes into consideration the structural changes and the growth in interdisciplinary studies seen in Dr. Saka’s analysis of co-authored papers together with the method and context of evaluations in Japan, would it not be correct to regard this figure as an overseas advance? Researchers are competing on the world stage. Even if the numbers are the same, the meaning those numbers have is markedly different. The international competitive environement to scholarly journals published in Japan is, even more serious now than it used to be. As Japanese scholars compete on the world stage (or feel they are doing so), what does the international position of journals published in Japan ment to us?

With the exception of such fields as clinical medicine, the share for Japanese articles among articles worldwide has fallen from its peak in 2000 to around 8 percent of the total now, while the share for journals published in Japan has also been gradually declining to around 2.5 percent. But the good news is that the impact factor for Japanese journals has been gradually rising, and the average citation rate has been steadily going up. To the extent that their current quantitative standing is known, perhaps the time has come when we need to reexamine the journals published in Japan and revitalize them using the ideas of researchers themselves, the ones who make these journals necessary. What sort of journal or scholarly publication do researchers turn to in their communications with one another? And what sort of journal system (review system) is desired in those fields in which joint research is advancing on the international stage? Or, perhaps, we are reaching the point where a weeding-out of journals is needed worldwide.

References

Barbara Richter-Ngogang, Head of the Goethe-Institut library, welcomes participants to the symposium and explains its aims.

ZB MED Director Ulrich Korwitz asks a question of Jun Adachi, Director of NII Cyber Science Infrastructure Development Department.

On March 8, 2011, three institutions, the German National Library of Science and Technology (Technische Informationsbibliothek, or TIB), the German National Library of Medicine (Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Medizin, or ZB MED) and the National Institute of Informatics (NII), signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). After the signing ceremony the participants took part in a symposium.1

First, I would like to acknowledge the efforts of the Goethe-Institut in Japan that led up to this memorable event. The idea of German-Japanese cooperation in the area of scholarly communication infrastructure has been nursed since the time Christel Mahnke was head of the library at the Goethe-Institut in Tokyo. The cooperation she had in mind was not just a formal exchange of documents but rather something that would produce tangible results. A study tour of Germany in November 2009 by university librarians and staff members at research institutes in Japan might be the precursor to the present MoU signing.2 More than a year after the tour, Barbara Richter-Ngogang, the new head of the Goethe-Institut library, inherited her predecessor’s vision, and at last it began to take shape. As a member of the study tour, I listened to the symposium with deep emotion with a high regard for all those who contributed to the arrangements.

The symposium introduced the current situation of the information infrastructure in Japan and Germany respectively. Ulrich Korwitz, Director of ZB MED, observed that, because of a distinctive feature of the political system, namely, the high degree of independence of each state, there is no central control mechanism in Germany, and funds for research projects tend to be distributed. As a result, institutions in Germany cooperate closely even when they manage information infrastructure. Certainly, projects like National Research Collection System or Electronic Journals Library would be difficult to sustain if each institute did not have its own responsibility. Herr Korwitz also referred to recent trends as intelligent information retrieval techniques, national licensing for electronic materials, open access, the long-term preservation of digital material, and virtual research environments. These topics are all current concerns in Japan as well, and with the signing of the MoU, sharing information with Germany are expected to increase even further.

At the beginning of his talk, Uwe Rosemann, Director of TIB, introduced his organization with photographs. TIB is located in the campus of Hannover University, so the contrast between the library specializing in science and technology and historic university buildings was interesting. His vision of the data center that supports scholarly research was also extremely interesting. Unlike research results published as journal articles, the massive amount of data comes out of the research process tends to be scattered or buried in laboratories all over the world. Under such circumstances, data centers have an important role in retrieving and providing wide variety of scholarly data. In Herr Rosemann’s view, the roles of a data center and a library should be regarded as separate, but considering the situation within Japan, it would be entirely possible for librarians to contribute to data management in cooperation with researchers.

On the Japanese side, Professor Jun Adachi, Director of NII Cyber Science Infrastructure Development Department, explained the current state of institutional repositories in Japan and the related services such as JAIRO and CiNii. Then, Koichi Ojiro, Director of the Information Management Department at the University of Tokyo Library System, introduced plans for JUSTICE, the new Japanese university library consortium. It was an extremely informative symposium that made it possible to get overview of the current situations in Germany and Japan. However, as a celebrating event for signing the MoU, I could have shared higher expectations for the future plans with other participants if I learned more specific ideas about cooperation between the two countries.

None of us at the meeting could have predicted that three days after the symposium, an enormous earthquake would strike Japan. The earthquake may have no small impact on promoting cooperation between Japan and Germany, but it is my heartfelt hope that the coalition that evolved out of the MoU signing will bear fruit from a long-term perspective, and I would like to contribute to it to fulfill my responsibility as a member who was given the precious opportunity to visit libraries in Germany.

References

On April 1, 2011, the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE) came into being.

JUSTICE got its start in accordance with the aims of an agreement to promote coordination and cooperation signed on October 13, 2010 by the Japanese Coordinating Committee for University Libraries and the National Institute of Informatics (NII). The new consortium is the result of an alliance between the Japan Association of National University Libraries Consortium (the JANUL consortium) and the Private and Public University Libraries Consortium (PULC). With the inauguration of JUSTICE, the approximately 500 participating institutions that make up the combined membership of the JANUL consortium and PULC became participating institutions in JUSTICE; thus, one of the largest consortia of its kind in the world has come to be established in Japan.

What lay behind its formation was the common awareness at the university, library, and government level of the need to further develop the existing consortia in order to deal with the not-easy-to-solve problems surrounding the stable and uninterrupted acquisition and provision of electronic journals and other scholarly information. Given JUSTICE’s mission to contribute to the enhancement of Japan’s academic information infrastructure, the focus of its activities will be on strengthening the consortium’s negotiating position with publishers vis-à-vis the joint purchase of electronic resources, which is a very pressing issue. That is not all, however; parallel to this are also plans to promote a number of other activities including expanding the national collection of e-resources, ensuring long-term preservation and access, managing and providing support for their use, and developing human resources.

When it comes to promoting plans and activities such as these, the participation of NII in the present alliance has very great implications. JUSTICE will be taking part in the activities of SPARC Japan as well as in the work of supporting the creation and coordination of institutional repositories that has been traditionally promoted by NII in cooperation with university libraries, and in so doing it can be said to be laying the foundation for a multifaceted approach to solving problems related to scholarly communication.

JUSTICE is managed by a steering committee and a secretariat, which are under the Cooperation Promotion Council set up by NII and the Coordinating Committee and which form the matrix for the organization’s activities. The steering committee is composed of committee members, who are mainly senior librarians, and cooperating members, who are in charge of business operations, in a form that enlists wide participation from the libraries of the national, private and public universities. In addition, the secretariat, which serves as the public face of the consortium, consists of the Library Liaison Office, which has recently been set up within NII Cyber Science Infrastructure Development Department, and three librarians from the national and private universities who carry out the day-to-day business.

Thus, JUSTICE is an epoch-making organization that overcomes the barriers separating the national, private, and public universities, promotes close cooperation between Japanese universities and NII, and embodies a united response to confronting the big issues. May I take this opportunity to ask all librarians and everyone at Japan’s academic societies to give JUSTICE your full cooperation and support.

Figure 1: JUSTICE’s operations (an overview)