Peter Suber - Google+ - Japanese Science Ministry recommends a national OA policy …

"The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology released an English translation of the July 2012 report from its Science Information Infrastructure Working Group on open access (OA) to research. The report seems to recommend (3.a) an OA mandate for publicly-funded research. It recommends (3.c) that public funders require grantees to report the "method of access" they have chosen for their results, and seems to support both gold OA and green OA as ways of satisfying the policy (3.b). Finally, it seems to support (4.c) a Liege-type rule making university evaluation of faculty depend in part on deposits in the institutional repository. Excerpts from the report overview: '[1.c] We should make proactive efforts to make open access possible. Along with the publication of open access journals, it is also beneficial to utilise institutional repositories that are launched and operated at universities and other institutions....[3.a] In particular, the results of publicly funded research should be widely accessible and available by the public...[3.b] There are still only a limited number of open access journals in Japan....However,...the Working Group...propose[s] that...a special provision should be made to promote open access journals. It is important for the funding agencies to unequivocally inform researchers, with the intention of discouraging them from avoiding submission to open access journals, that the financial costs incurred on the part of researchers, including publication fees, can be paid with the funds they award them....In Japan, it is considered to be realistic to take advantage of 'institutional repositories' as a vehicle for shifting to open access, owned by universities and other institutions. Negotiation should take place with society and commercial publishers who hold copyrights with a view to making the timing as early as possible and the content as close as the version of record....[3.c] Funding agencies should require researchers to report to them the method of access to the results of the funded research, including it open access availability, as they need to in control of the relationship between funding and its consequences....[4.c] It is important to put effort into information dissemination via institutional repositories as a subject of evaluation in institutional certified evaluation systems, and to understand and publicise the status of such endeavours. It is also important to include information dissemination efforts as one of the evaluation points when universities evaluate achievements of individual researchers...'"