Re: 17% GREEN in Japan

From: Syun Tutiya <tutiya_at_KENON.L.CHIBA-U.AC.JP>
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 04:44:30 +0900

Dear Stevan and all,

Some backgrounds to the Japan survey and some personal comments.

1. We sent out the questionaire to all scholarly societies whose
   addresses we know. So they range from the smallest and the
   largest. Some publish international journals in English and some do
   only national journals in Japanese.

2. The number of societies and that of journal titles are very close,
   as there are no large enough societies that publish many enough
   titles. There are virtually no commercial publishers in Japan that
   publish scholarly journals in English. That is why we asked
   societies that publish, not publishers in general.

3. So to me, Stevan's INTERPRETATION I is correct. Japan differs from
   the rest of the publishing world. But it is not because Japanese
   publishing is different from the rest of the publishing world but
   because, few Japanese society publishers are players in the
   worldwide publishing arena.

   Note, though, that Japanese research community produces more than
   10% of resaerch articles published by Thomson Scientific's
   registered journals, second only to the US. That fact could be
   interpreted to corroborate Stevan's INTERPRETATION II. More than
   80% percent of Japanese research results are accessible in the
   English-language internaltional journals publshed by non-Japanese
   publishers, which are either for-profit or not-for-profit.

   But for Japanese researchers, research results published and
   available in Japanese are also important, and students benefit very
   much from reading research results in their native language. That
   is why we asked all Japanese societies which publish journals at
   all.

4. Stevan's INTERPRETATION III suggests three possibities which are
   not mutually exclusive:

            A. The survey was not easily understandable by Japanese
               societies

            B. Japanese societies are not imformed of the development
               of OA in the rest of the world

            C. both of a. and b.
   
   I think the C. is right, but I would add that the survey was not
   easily understable to Japanese societies not because of the wording
   but because of B. Those in charge of composing the questionaire
   were very ambivalent between the fear of not being understandable
   from insufficient explanation and the fear of not being answered
   from too much explanation. I personally think they did a good job,
   but in face there are witnessed cases where their intentions did
   not get through to respondents.

   Stevan suspects that in some cases the survey was treated
   mechanically within publishers, but in so doing he overestimates
   the size and functioning of Japanese socieites. I hear that in
   many cases the survey was discussed not only editorial but
   governing boards sometimes without any conclusion, hence the
   40% response rate.
   
> The three interpretations are not mutually exclusive, but my guess is that
> the truth is more a combination of II and III than I.

All in all, the truth is the combination of I, II and III.

Syun
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Syun Tutiya
Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences, Chiba University
University Librarian, Chiba University
Address: Faculty of Letters, Chiba University
         1-33 Yayoicho, Inageku, Chiba 263-8522, JAPAN
(phone) +81-43-290-2277(office)2240(libray) (fax) +81-43-290-2278(office)
(mail) tutiya_at_kenon.L.chiba-u.ac.jp (uri) http://CogSci.L.chiba-u.ac.jp/~tutiya/
(Institutional Repository:CURATOR) http://mitizane.chiba-u.jp/curator/
Received on Fri Mar 10 2006 - 22:18:14 GMT

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