SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) today announced the launch of SPARC Japan, a collaboration of Japanese academic institutions and scholarly societies working to promote and make widely available the work of Japanese researchers. SPARC Japan is an initiative of the Tokyo-based National Institute of Informatics (NII), a national research institute which unites Japanese academic librarians, scholars, researchers, universities and learned societies to support initiatives that improve scholarly communications in Japan.
SPARC Japan is supported by more than 600 university libraries affiliated with library associations, including those of national, private and prefectural/municipal university libraries. As an authorized SPARC affiliate in Japan, SPARC Japan will create initiatives that encourage improved access to Japanese research and support expanded institutional and scholarly community roles in, and control over, the scholarly communication process.
"Japan is among the top contributors to scientific research worldwide. The launch of SPARC Japan will promote access to Japanese research so that others may benefit from our progress," said Jun Adachi, SPARC Japan Director and Professor at NII. "SPARC Japan will partner primarily with Japanese scientific societies to make their research widely available, while our close association with NII will facilitate the enhancement of Japanese university libraries' open access institutional repositories. These initiatives have been officially recognized and approved by the government in its working report on the Japan Cyber Science Infrastructure, and the overwhelming support we have received so far indicates a great need in the scholarly publishing community that SPARC Japan has already begun to fill." ...
SPARC Japan has already lined up a number of publishing partners. They include the UniBio Press, a non-profit aggregation of biological journals such as the international journal Zoological Science and leading mathematical journals such as Tohoku Mathematical Journal, Japanese Journal of Applied Physics (JJAP), and others. (For a complete list of SPARC Japan partners, please see [here].) ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/19/2006 11:10:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
