Country Feature: Open Access, OJS, and OPS in Japan

Emma Uhl takes us on a journey through Japan’s often underrepresented open access landscape, and its use of PKP’s OJS as well as OPS.

Although Japan is recognized globally as a powerhouse of research and scholarly output, it is not a country that often gets spotlighted in the discussions of open access to research. As Matthew Salter writes in his wonderfully informative guest post for the Scholarly Kitchen, Open Access in Japan: Tapping the Stone Bridge, Japan has taken a decidedly less radical approach to open access compared to some of the ambitious, system-upending policies seen coming out of other regions, which may explain why Japan often goes unmentioned.

Furthering the distance is the relatively centralized approach to online journal publishing in the country. The Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) is the Japanese government agency tasked with implementing policies created by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. The agency promotes science and tech developments through funding programs, public engagement, R&D strategy creation, and of course, information dissemination and database services.

One of its dissemination platforms is J-STAGE, undoubtedly the most well-known electronic journal platform in Japan. J-STAGE was developed by JST in 1999 and as of March 18, 2024, hosts 3,966 journal titles and 5.65 million articles, the majority (5.42 million) of which are openly accessible. 

As a result of its comparatively cautious mandates and policies as well as J-STAGE’s ability to serve as a centralized national journal platform, specifically tailored to the Japanese research environment, Japan has not often found itself turning toward alternative open source platforms, such as PKP’s software. At this point, there are 20 Open Journal Systems (OJS) installations and a national Open Preprint Systems (OPS) portal.

Of the 20 OJS installations, several fall outside of the purview of peer-reviewed scholarly publications, including a bulletin and a term paper submission system for Keio University’s Institute for Advanced Biosciences. Taking a close look at the peer-reviewed publications reveals some interesting shared characteristics, namely that the primary locale was generally set to English rather than Japanese (true for 18 of 20 installations); and they tended to be for a specifically international, bilingual or non-Japanese living in Japan audience.

Some interesting examples include:

• Cuadernos CANELA: The journal of CANELA (Confederación Académica Nipona, Española y Latinoamericana): An academic confederation for Spanish and Hispanic studies based in the city of Nagoya. 
• JALT Publications: OJS was once used for publications released by the Japan Association for Language Teaching, whose primary audience consists of teachers from English-speaking nations who work to provide English as a Second Language education in Japan. 
• The International Journal of Educational Media and Technology: A collaboration between South Korea’s KAEIM (Korean Association for Educational Information and Media) and Japan’s JAEMS (Japan Association for Educational Media Studies).

It is also interesting to note that while a limited number of associations and institutions in Japan host their own installations, some journals with a significant percentage of Japanese researchers making up their editorial boards and Japanese Editors-in-Chief, such as the Lowland Technology International Journal and the Journal of Illusion, rely on hosting on OJS infrastructure managed in other nations such as Indonesia and Sweden, respectively.

This raises a chicken-and-egg type of question: are these associations using OJS because of its lower barrier to publishing while offering multilingual flexibility and serving the needs of cross-cultural collaboration? Or is OJS simply more likely to be known by researchers in Japan working in cross-cultural milieus?

In 2023, PKP founder John Willinsky visited JST’s Tokyo office to meet with J-STAGE platform staff to discuss ways of increasing the collaboration. John also met with Prof. Björn-Ole Kamm (Editor of the Japanese Journal of Analog Role Playing and translator of OJS into Japanese), as well as other faculty and librarians at Kyoto University, to discuss supporting faculty and student journals and related initiatives at the university. These were important steps in furthering PKP’s understanding of research needs in Japan and our connection to its research community.

While it may appear that PKP has only begun to make a contribution to Japanese scholarly publishing, the Open Preprint Systems (OPS) installation is of particular significance because of where it is situated in the nation’s scholarly publishing landscape.

Jxiv is a national preprint server established by JST with OPS, and was launched in 2022 as an element of Japan’s Open Science Policy, which was influenced by a 2020 report that looked at Japan’s contribution to COVID-19 related preprints. The agency leveraged its extensive experience, cultivated from J-STAGE, and also reached out to Brazil’s OPS-based national preprint repository, SciELO Preprints, as well as PKP, for assistance in creating a similar platform, resulting in a quick launch.

While Jxiv has seen modest growth in submissions in its first two years, JST has expressed confidence that more Japanese researchers will come to embrace preprints over time. In a great Scholarly Kitchen guest post by Matthew Salter, A Year of Jxiv – Warming the Preprints Stone, JST Director of the Department for Information Infrastructure, Ritsuko Nakajima, and J-STAGE and Jxiv platform manager, Soichi Kubota, elaborate on the need for further promotion of repositories and the advantages of preprint, reminding us that Japanese culture errs on the side of caution and thoroughness over speediness.

Although PKP at this point is playing a modest role in Japan’s scholarly communication strategy, we are very proud that OPS was selected for Jxiv and delighted that OJS is serving scholars in multi-cultural and multilingual research settings. We look forward to strengthening our relationship and increasing our collaboration with JST and Japan’s researcher community to the advantage of open access to research and scholarship in Japan.  

Thanks to the OPS package we were able to build Jxiv quickly. The fact that there were already preprint servers using OPS, such as SciELO preprints was also a plus.

– Ritsuko Nakajima, Director of the Department for Information Infrastructure, JST

Jump to other newsletter sections

📌 New to Archipelago? Check out our Introduction

📌 Celebrating 12 years of PITT-PKP Development Partnership

📌 Importance of JATS XML in Scholarly Publishing: Interview with Alec Smecher

📌 Events Recap for Q1 of 2024