International Scholarly Communication Initiative | Events | 2016 | The 1st SPARC Japan Seminar 2016"Roads to Open Access for Japan"

"As a response to the 'serials crisis' caused by the chronic subscription cost increases of scholarly journals, Japanese university libraries have formed a consortium for electronic resources and signed up the Big Deal of the scholarly journals, in parallel have led an open access movement over institutional repositories, and recently have been implementing open access policies of their institutions.

The present well-recognized open access methods are two ways. One is so-called the green OA (open access) in which, against the publishers’ subscription based and access controlled journals, authors or institutional staff store the copy or author version of the articles written by the authors of their institutions in institutional repositories and make a free access of them. The other is the gold OA in which authors pay publishers APC (article processing charges) for open access publishing from originating journal sites.

After the UK government announced the acceptance of Finch report in 2012 that will make all-publicly funded research in the UK open access via gold OA journals, several amount of bipolar debates on the green OA versus the gold OA arise in the EU countries. In the UK, Jisc (formerly the UK Joint Information Systems Committee) promotes changing hybrid journals that consists of both subscription based and APC based business models to gold OA, and made some pilot agreements with publishers of hybrid journals to develop the offsetting systems to cap the total amount of expenditures of institutions. The Netherlands VSNU (The Association of Universities in the Netherlands) renewed its subscription to a bundle of 2,000 paywalled journals from the publisher Springer, but with terms that made papers by corresponding authors at subscribing Dutch universities OA, for no extra charge, and made a similar agreement with Elsevier. The European Commission announced the launch of an ‘Open Science Policy Platform’ with a remit that includes investigating how subscription publishers can best transition to OA. In a particular research field, the high-energy physics community formed a consortium SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) to make a business model in which major disciplinary journals are transitioned to gold OA. However, an opinion leader of OA and a promoter of self-archiving, Stevan Harnad expressed a warning of blindly devotion to the gold OA among scholarly communities. COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) also announced the statement of the same alert jointly with UNESCO. Moreover, a variety of stakeholders are blogging their opinions to express their thought of warning on imminent transition to gold OA.

Along with these events of OA, how should we act for OA in Japan? Since we have been deeply surrounded with substantial amount of journals originating from European countries and US, we cannot ignore the OA movement. As for Japanese academic community, urgently we have to discuss about how we can deal with the gold OA and retrospectively think of the green OA. In this seminar, those of practitioners and researchers who are interested in OA movement in Japan are welcome to get together and discuss on the topic."