Conscientious Open Access Update from Japan

Hideki Uchijima, Librarian of the Kanazawa University Library provides more accurate estimates of the percentage (11.1%) of Japanese annual refereed research article output that is currently being self-archived in the 158 Japanese Institutional Repositories that are being harvested by JAIRO, basing the estimate on the ISI Thompson-Reuters subset, confirming that Japan's unmandated self-archiving rate indeed falls within the global average baseline of 5-25%. The good news is that Hokkaido University (already registered in ROARMAP in 2008 as having an OA policy, but not yet an OA mandate) might soon be upgrading to a self-archiving mandate (and this might encourage further universities in Japan to do likewise) and that Uchijima will now also try to persuade the IR managers of the remaining 81 Japanese universities (out of the 158 JAIRO total) who (unlike Hokkaido University and 76 other Japanese universities) have not yet done so, to register their IRs in ROAR.