At the recent Japan Library Fair on November 20, 2024, Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and CHORUS partnered to bring together six expert speakers to discuss the “Many Paths to Open Access”. CHORUS has been partnering with JST since 2017, bringing important conversations and international presence to the Japanese library community each year.

In the past two years alone, attendance at these sessions has doubled with more interaction and thought-provoking discussion with the community. We have seen an increased engagement from libraries and research management administration since the National Open Science Policy was first released and has now been finalized.

Japan’s Push for Open Access

Japan is adopting a National Open Science Policy for research grants for nominated programs awarded from the new fiscal year in April 2025. This means that peer-reviewed articles resulting from the specified grants from JSPS, JST, and AMED, the three largest national funding agencies, must be open access upon publication as well as the data underpinning the research. Japan is, therefore, one of the first countries to enact a national open access strategy.

The CHORUS/JST Forum presented examples of workflows and services to help libraries and research administrators comply with the policy, understanding that there are many paths to open access.

CHORUS’ monitoring service for institutions and funders sources key data on research outputs and supports measurement and compliance. JST is a participating CHORUS funder. JST  hosts the J-STAGE (https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/) journal platform, the Jxiv (https://jxiv.jst.go.jp/index.php/jxiv)  preprint service, and the J-STAGE Data repository. 

Provided peer-reviewed articles and their associated data can be accessed and read by anyone, then they are compliant with the National Open Science Policy in Japan

CHORUS/JST Forum – The Many Paths to Open Access

The event was hosted by Ritsuko Nakajima, Director, Department for Information Infrastructure, JST and Mark Robertson, Director, CHORUS Asia Pacific. The discussion after the presentation, moderated by Katsu Arai, Wiley, enabled a dialog between the speakers, who are all working for similar goals in the scholarly communications community, including the management of costs, ensuring diversity, and compliance, and reducing the burden on researchers.

Two international publishers discussed a range of open access alternatives for researchers, including Subscribe to Open (S2O), read and publish, and transformative agreements. They each offered different and distinct perspectives giving more variety and breadth to the library community – Colette Bean, Chief Publishing Officer, American Physiological Society as a not-for-profit member society supporting 25,000 members, and Katsu Arai, Vice President, Institutional Sales APAC MEA CA and Representative Director Wiley Publishing Japan K.K., as a large commercial publisher who have their own extensive portfolio including society partnerships and services for libraries and publishers.

Two library speakers covered their solutions for open science. Yuta Kobayashi from the Planning and User Support Division, Chiba University in Japan, covered the management of their institutional repository, where their workflow, including CHORUS, enables posting links to open access articles and for researchers to self-archive accepted articles after embargos. Justin Shearer, Associate Director, Research Information & Engagement, from the University of Melbourne in Australia, illustrated where the library and research administration work together to offer open access options for their researchers, to work with the different publishers’ models, and to ensure that over time, the university achieves its own open science goals.

Soichi Kubota from the Department for Information Infrastructure at JST ran through the J-STAGE and other platform services provided by JST. These are provided for the scholarly communications community in Japan to achieve publication and posting of research outputs in line with JST’s own open science principles.

The CHORUS/JST Forum concluded with Yutaka Hayashi, Deputy Manager, Scholarly and Academic Information Division, Cyber Science Infrastructure Development Department, National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Japan, who talked through several of NII’s initiatives being developed for institutions to monitor research outputs and build repository capacity.

CHORUS/JST Forum: The Many Paths to Open Access, presentations and videos 

The next joint CHORUS/JST Forum will be held during the Japan Open Science Summit in June 2025. 

Keep up-to-date with the latest events from CHORUS and explore our archive.