How Japan Lost the Plot on Open Access

Globally, the open access (OA) movement has long sought to liberate scholarly communication from commercial publishers. But Japan pursues open access and open science from a unique context; that approach has often blurred the OA landscape and left Japanese academics perplexed. In this article, I will explore how economic history and national policy have shaped a uniquely Japanese approach to open access and consider what this means for the country’s ongoing relationship to the OA movement.

The Global OA Agenda: Confrontation with Commercial Publishers

Motivated by ever-increasing subscription costs, the global open access movement is rooted in an effort to broaden access to academic journals. The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) grew out of this concern and in 2002 recommended two ways to make academic journals open access: 1) the self-archiving of refereed journal articles in open electronic archives (green OA) and 2) the founding of open access journals (gold OA).

Later, the open access agenda was picked up by funders, especially private funders, who wanted to see a greater and swifter impact from their financial investment than paywalled research outputs allowed. Some funders approached the issue by constructing open access publishing platforms; for example, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) constructed PubMed Central (PMC) and the Gates Foundation the Gates Open Research platform. Others funded open access fees; first Research Councils UK (RCUK) and now UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), for example, provided block grants for research organizations to cover the costs of OA publishing. In either case, the funders were more effective than the academics, as they could enforce open access through their funding schema. Plan S, the latest initiative by European funders to achieve immediate OA, is based on the OA2020 vision originally proposed by the Max Planck Institute. Although it remains to be seen whether Plan S will succeed, it is fair to say that Plan S has already induced change that OA2020 could not achieve on its own.

In 2021, the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science added the concepts of inclusiveness, equity, and sustainability to the open access agenda, incorporating viewpoints from the Global South. By then, in response to the growth of article processing charges (APCs), the open access agenda had expanded its focus from reading academic journals to include publishing academic articles. Regardless, the movement continued to confront commercial publishers.

The Japanese Context: Serials Crisis Dissolved

The open access discussion in Japan has a different background. Before 1985, Japan suffered from the high subscription costs of academic journals, just like the rest of the world. Access to international academic journals was always part of the national agenda, as Japanese academic institutions could not afford journals, especially those that had to be purchased from outside the country. In the late 1970s, the Ministry of Education had strategically assigned several leading universities to purchase journals for certain disciplines and make them available to other universities through interlibrary loan. In 1986, following strongly worded guidance from the Science Council Japan, the ministry established the National Center for Science Information Systems (NACSIS), now the National Institute of Informatics (NII), to develop and provide an online search service (NACSIS-CAT) for academic books and articles that were distributed across several hundred universities. Because this was the era before the Internet, NACSIS even took on the role of building and managing the online network across Japan, which became the Science Information NETwork, SINET. Today, SINET provides a 400Gbps information and communication network for universities and research institutions throughout Japan.

In 1985, outside events brought about a drastic change. The US was suffering from a severe trade deficit. In response, France, West Germany, Japan, the UK, and the US signed the so-called Plaza Accord, a joint agreement to depreciate the US dollar relative to the currencies of the other signing countries. Within a year, the yen-dollar exchange rate, which had been 240 in 1985, reached 150. In Japan, the serials crisis ended almost overnight.

Even though the Plaza Accord was dissolved in 1987, the yen would keep rising until Prime Minister Abe intervened in 2012, continuing to shelter Japan from the world’s serials crisis.

A Different Motivation: Openness for Transparency and Reach

In the early 2000s, publishers began to provide access to international academic journals through online platforms, packaging them in so-called “big deals.” Japanese academic institutions suddenly found themselves able to access a wealth of academic literature for the same price—or even less—than they had once paid for a much smaller number of individual subscriptions.

So, in 2002, when institutions around the world struggling to gain access to academic journals confronted the issue through the BOAI, Japan was absent from the conversation; in the years that followed, as open access continued to evolve, Japan remained ignorant of the global movement. Some Japanese university librarians, knowing that their situation was illusory, tried to explain the BOAI to their institutions, but without any success. Japanese academics did not feel the pain.

Thus, when a Japanese academic, having encountered an institutional repository in the US, brought the idea to Japan in the early 2000s, they were conceived as a tool for the digital archiving and international dissemination of academic literature, rather than a tool for green OA, and primarily housed university bulletin papers—bulletins published by academic departments that contained non-peer reviewed research notes and which were considered gray literature. Even today, university bulletin papers make up almost 40 percent of the contents of Japanese institutional repositories. It is only because dedicated Japanese librarians visited researchers’ labs one by one and asked for the author accepted manuscripts of their recently published work that peer-reviewed articles now represent 15 percent of institutional repository content.

In 2013, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) mandated that all doctoral theses be deposited in an institutional repository and made available open access. Though the term “open access” was used in the mandate, the aim of this order was to elevate the quality and integrity of doctoral theses through the transparency of the Internet. It is possible that neither the government nor the universities knew the original idea behind the term.

Nevertheless, as every doctorate-awarding university in Japan now needed an institutional repository, their number rapidly increased, from around 260 in 2012 to close to 700 in 2017. Today, there are more than 850 institutional repositories in Japan. The institutional repository cloud service JAIRO Cloud, established by NII in 2012, has made it easy to set one up.

Research Data Management In the Spotlight

Beginning in late 2012, the economic policies of Prime Minister Abe—known as Abenomics—triggered the rapid decline of the yen, from 75 yen per US dollar in 2011, to 123 yen per US dollar in 2015. Suddenly, academic journal subscriptions were once again unaffordable to Japanese universities; several dozen Japanese universities, including some of the seven former imperial universities—which are considered the country’s most elite and research-intensive—had to drop their contracts with publishers. Still, the suddenness of the change made it hard for Japanese academics to recognize the connection between this phenomenon and the global open access movement.

In 2013, Masaru Kitsuregawa, one of world’s top scholars in computer science, became the director general of NII. He was new to the scholarly communication world. As a computer scientist, however, he was enthusiastic about developing a scholarly communication infrastructure with cutting-edge technology.

In his new position, Kitsuregawa came up to speed on the history of the global open access movement as a response to the serials crisis as well as recent developments around research data and open science, and he saw a game he thought he could win. He quickly concluded that data, rather than open access to research publications, was the shiny new opportunity in scholarly publishing in the twenty-first century, and that there were chances left to beat the commercial publishers if Japan acted quickly enough.

Accordingly, Kitsuregawa pushed open science and open research data into the mainstream of Japan’s science and technology (S&T) policy. In the 5^th Science and Technology Basic Plan, which established the national S&T policy agenda for fiscal year 2016 to fiscal year 2020, the terms “open science” and “open research data” appeared for the first time. As described in the plan, Japan’s open science agenda was to be pursued for the sake of open innovation, citizen science, and accountability. Given the sensitivity of research data, the plan suggested the “open and closed strategy” (also known as “as open as possible and as closed as necessary” in the West) for its management. Research data infrastructure was to be developed to manage and share research data efficiently. The plan included no open access agenda for academic journals.

With funding allocated by the plan, NII established the Research Center for Open Science and Data Platforms (RCOS), which was to develop data platforms for research data, in 2017. To that point, the institutional repository cloud service JAIRO Cloud contained only text documents; now, upgrades were started to ensure it could also accommodate research data. CiNii Research, a discovery service that had evolved out of NACSIS-CAT and that covered university library books, Japanese-written research articles, and academic papers harvested from JAIRO Cloud, was also to be updated to include research data. In addition, a new data management infrastructure, GakuNin RDM, was established to support collaborative research. Together, these three research data platforms are called the NII Research Data Cloud (NII RDC).

NII pursued a similar focus in the 6^th Science, Technology, and Innovation Basic Plan (FY2021–2025) by positioning NII RDC as Japan’s core infrastructure for research data management and reuse. The plan required major research funding schemas to include data management plans (DMPs) by 2023, with metadata linked to the DMPs circulated through the NII RDC. The plan also required all academic institutions with an institutional repository to form a research data policy by 2025. While the plan acknowledged “open access” as a global trend, again, it was not a measure to be pursued.

The Shift to an Immediate Open Access Mandate

Kitsuregawa ended his term in March 2023 having secured major funding for research data infrastructure and related initiatives. RCOS is still actively working on upgrading some functions of the NII RDC.

From the perspective of the cabinet office leading S&T policy, however, Kitsuregawa’s departure meant that they were no longer bound by the research data agenda. Cabinet office staff took another look at open access and noticed that transformative agreements, triggered by Plan S, were growing in Europe, while the negotiations of Japanese universities had largely stalled. Although most countries outside Europe had not joined Plan S, seeing the initiative as too bold to follow, in the summer of 2022, the US had announced guidance in line with Plan S (Nelson, 2022).

At the same time, Japan was preparing to host the G8 meeting in May 2024, and the government was in search of some new agenda to propose. So, in February 2024, out of the blue for most Japanese academics, the government announced a policy requiring immediate open access for publicly funded research outputs (Integrated Innovation Strategy Promotion Council, 2024).

In two ways, the policy was even bolder than Plan S. First, it applied not only to the article but also to its “underlying data” (note that the provisional English translation cited above does not include the term “underlying,” but it is present in the original Japanese). Second, it required all research outputs from specified major funding schemes to be made immediately open access on an institutional repository, establishing a green OA mandate, while Plan S allows researchers to meet its immediate OA mandate through various routes.

Presumably, “underlying data” was included in the immediate OA policy in order to populate Japanese institutional repositories with research data. Japan had invested much in the deployment of institutional repositories and needed to fill them with academic outputs. But the policy left Japanese academics profoundly confused.

It would turn out that the term “underlying data” in the policy was meant to refer to the “supplementary data” that is often published with research articles. But academics, believing that the policy was asking them to make the underlying data of their research open on the Internet, protested. The cabinet office’s attempt to clarify the policy in an FAQ neither resolved the confusion of academics nor allayed their concern. The policy also failed to include any measures for authors to retain their copyrights, as Plan S does through its Rights Retention Strategy, creating uncertainty for researchers and ultimately undermining the immediate green OA mandate, as I’ll detail in a moment. On top of this, the new open access policy, which addressed research articles with underlying data, got conflated with the earlier open science policy, which focused on research data and its management, deepening researchers’ confusion.

The policy also faced great protest from university libraries that claimed they were too understaffed to register all of their researchers’ publications. Relying on self-archiving by researchers was out of the question; the researchers would probably forget to self-archive, and even if they did not, the metadata would not be accurate. Cabinet office staff clarified that even though immediate OA meant “zero embargo,” they would allow institutions several months to register an article on their institutional repository. In a footnote, they indicated that they would even allow only metadata to be registered; in practice, a metadata-only repository entry would direct users to the publisher’s website to read the article, undermining any pretense of an OA policy that confronted the interests of commercial publishers.

The cabinet office FAQ further stated that researchers should wait to make an article open on an institutional repository if “some problem” prevented their doing so, instructing them to act as soon as “the problem” had cleared. In practice, the policy was telling researchers to wait until an embargo period ended before adding an article to an institutional repository. Thus, the immediate OA mandate no longer mandated immediate OA.

By inadvertently undermining its immediate green OA mandate, the Cabinet office ultimately made its policy more difficult to follow: the greatest challenge for researchers and librarians is not registering an article, but determining the embargo period, which journals often couch in language that is difficult to find and interpret. A real immediate OA policy with rights retention would have provided both clarity and administrative simplicity. Instead, the policy created new headaches for researchers and librarians.

Will Japan Ever Get Its Act Together on OA?

Did Japanese policymakers ever understand the intention of the global open access movement to broaden access to academic outputs that had been gated by the commercial publishers? It remains a mystery. Even though Japan’s OA policy mentioned that aim, it also identified its primary motivation as accountability to the public. And even though the policy mandated green OA, it also allowed for the payment of APCs and provided block funding that many universities used for that purpose (Chawla, 2024). Furthermore, it established a team to negotiate with publishers “to optimize the financial burden on the research community,” i.e., to negotiate transformative agreements, putting them out of step with Plan S, which had announced in 2023 that it would no longer provide financial support for transformative agreements (cOAlition S, 2023). So, while the policy caused some damage to commercial publishers, it also offered them benefits.

The Japanese approach to open access may have been further shaped by the country’s relative lack of reliance on international journals and scholarly communication infrastructures. In Japan, Japanese-language journals still play an important role in higher education and beyond, including STEM journals that are read by Japanese industries. Infrastructures supported by governmentally funded institutions, such as NII, provide an important and stable base for scholarly communication in Japan. At the same time, the funding streams of these standing institutions require constant renewal, subjecting them to the disruption of shifts in policy. The major funding Kitsuregawa acquired through his “research data” agenda is a prime example.

The 7^th Science, Technology, and Innovation Basic Plan (FY2026–2030), which is to start in April this year, is currently under discussion. In the latest draft, announced in November 2025, the term “open science” disappeared, while “immediate OA” remained, and “AI for Science,” accompanied by many research-data-related measures, emerged. Meanwhile, in the EU, the terms “open science” and “open access” continue to be “the gold standard for R&I activities,” as noted in the Horizon Europe Strategic Plan 2025–2027 (European Commission: Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, 2024).

Where does this leave Japan? On its own journey. Japan, always keen to adopt the latest buzzwords and trendy policies, creates an impression of being up-to-date with global science and technology practices. But without a true understanding of their original contexts or backgrounds, Japan imports some policies, including those on open access and open science, without aligning them to either the international movements out of which they originated or to Japan’s own context. As a result, these policies only cause confusion domestically. It is time for Japan to start to think independently about how to interpret our unique situation and to make our own decisions for the sake of the Japanese academe.

References

Budapest Open Access Initiative. (2002, February 14). Read the declaration. https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read/

UNESCO (2021). Recommendation on open science. https://www.unesco.org/en/open-science/about

MEXT. (2013). 学位規則の一部を改正する省令の施行について. https://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/koutou/daigakuin/detail/1331790.htm

Council for Science, Technology and Innovation, Cabinet Office. (2015). Report on the 5th science and technology basic plan (tentative translation). Government of Japan. https://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/kihonkeikaku/5basicplan_en.pdf

Council for Science, Technology and Innovation, Cabinet Office (2021). 6^th science, technology, and innovation basic plan. Government of Japan. https://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/english/sti_basic_plan.pdf

Nelson, A. (2022). Memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies: Ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research. Office of Science and Technology Policy. https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/65799

Integrated Innovation Strategy Promotion Council. (2024). National policy on promoting open access to publicly funded scholarly publications and scientific data (Provisional translation). https://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/oa_240216_en.pdf

Measures for the implementation of “National policy on promoting open access to publicly funded scholarly publications and scientific data.” (2024). https://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/hosaku_en.pdf

cOAlition S. (2023). cOAlition S confirms the end of its financial support for open access publishing under transformative arrangements after 2024. https://www.coalition-s.org/coalition-s-confirms-the-end-of-its-financial-support-for-open-access-publishing-under-transformative-arrangements-after-2024/

Chawla, DS. (2024). Japan’s push to make all research open access is taking shape. Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01493-8

European Commission: Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. (2024). Horizon Europe strategic plan 2025–2027. Publications Office of the European Union. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/092911