JST and CHORUS Hold an Invitation Only Workshop at JST Headquarters in Tokyo (12 February 2020)

Guest Post by Mark Robertson

Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and CHORUS jointly organised a workshop at JST’s Headquarters in Tokyo in February 2020. Thirty-one invited delegates attended from institutions in Japan that use or are trialling the CHORUS dashboard and data services. The program was as follows;

Rick Anderson, Associate Dean for Collections and Scholarly Communication at University of Utah – J. Willard Marriott Library and a CHORUS Board member, outlined CHORUS’ history, vision and mode of operation and the development program scheduled for 2020. (presentation)

Mark Robertson, CHORUS’ Development Director for Asia Pacific, outlined the history of CHORUS in Japan and demonstrated the functionality of the dashboard and data services for institutions. (presentation)

Thereafter there were three use-case presentations on CHORUS from:

Yasushi Ogasaka, Director of the Department for Information Infrastructure at JST (presentation)

Akiko Chiba, from the Institutional Repository Division at Chiba University’s Library (presentation)

Chie Onodera, from the Materials Data Platform Center at the National Institute of Materials Library. ( presentation)

There followed an hour and a half of interactive discussion facilitated by Dr. Yasushi Ogasaka of JST who solicited a robust debate amongst the delegates on a range of subjects. These included the value of and potential uses of CHORUS, Japan’s connection to global scholarly communications networks, the measurement of research output, issues in open science and storing and accessing datasets.

Anderson commented that “One of my big takeaways from the discussion was that Japan is like the US in a lot of ways, one of them being an abiding ambivalence about the future, function, and cost/benefit balance of OA… But at the workshop today, people weren’t invited based on their perspective on OA – they were invited based on their roles and functions in the scholarly communications ecosystem, and that made for a diverse spectrum of viewpoints. I was very impressed by the depth and the rigor of the discussion that came after the presentations.”