Japan’s Preprint Server: Jxiv - Tokyo 2024

[Applause] NEXT speaker have JAPANPrintServer JV will be Japanese beit JAPAN Science and Technology agency Hello everyone, I'm Nakajima from JST. Thank you for taking this opportunity today. I'd like to introduce J, a preprint server that I operate. Before we get to the main topic, I'd like to briefly introduce what kind of organization JST is. JST is a national research and development agency under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (the diagram is missing here).

About three-quarters of our budget is used for funding research and development, and we also do public engagement and plan the country 's research strategy, among other things. We also have an information platform and a business related to scientific and technological information platforms and databases. The Information Infrastructure Division, to which I belong, is promoting this business. There are various services, and each of these circles represents one service. These services are research We operate these as platforms that are useful for development.

Let me introduce a few of them. At the very top is J-STAGE, which is an online journal platform. It is a platform where Japanese academic societies can publish journals, and currently there are as many as 4,000 journals published on it. Below that is J-GLOBAL, which is a discovery service that allows you to search for domestic and international literature and patents. The Research Map at the bottom left is a researcher consultation service.

When researchers register here, they can have a portal to organize and publish their research results. There are about 306,000 registered users in Japan. At the very bottom is the JST Project Database, which provides information on research projects from JST, a funding agency. The JST services I will introduce today are located at the top left. In providing these many services, what we have been focusing on recently is not the service itself, but how to provide these services seamlessly within the research workflow.

On the left, I have shown a typical research workflow. In other words, first you conduct a survey of prior research methods, then you create a research plan and secure funding. There is a general flow of securing resources, conducting research, writing papers based on those results, submitting them to journals, receiving income, publishing, outreach, and evaluation. However, the intention is for it to be utilized at each of these stages. Within this workflow, publishing research results in journals with extensive readership remains the primary method, but a phenomenon is occurring where research results are shifting upstream.

In other words, there is a trend to publish papers at an earlier stage than receiving extensive readership and publication in journals with extensive readership, and then accelerate research by receiving input and feedback from the research community. To address this in Japan, we launched J. The J division was released in March 2022. In addition to the objectives I just mentioned, we also want to contribute to the promotion of open science. J accepts paper submissions in English and Japanese.

We are accepting submissions of papers before they are read extensively, and we cover all fields, accepting submissions not only from within Japan but also from overseas. We are focusing on research papers, so having a researcher ID is a requirement. While reading is open access, you need to register with the J-section to submit, so at that time, we require registration of a researcher ID, such as the ResearchMap or Orchid I mentioned earlier, which are global IDs. As of last year, 310 papers have been published, and there are already quite a few global preprint servers in the world, but we launched this at a different time than some others. One of them is COVID-19, and this is a quote from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology's Science and Technology Policy Research Institute's 9-step report, and the graph on the left is a count of COVID-19 submissions to the global preprint server from February to August 2020, but it is a bit hastily put together.

I understand. On the right side, you can see where the posts are coming from. Japan is 13th, and compared to the US, which has about 4000, Japan has only 200, which is a very small number. Our hypothesis is that the use of preprints in response to changes in the research workflow has not yet become widespread among Japanese researchers. In addition to COVID-19, we thought that research closely tied to specific regions, such as environmental research, civil engineering research, and research on natural disasters like earthquakes, as well as humanities and social science research related to Japan, would be in demand for these regional preprint servers.

Furthermore, there is the fact that a large amount of research is conducted in Japanese. On the right side, as I mentioned earlier, there are statistics on what languages ​​are used in the journals on the journal platform J-STAGE. Out of 3500 journals at the time, English papers accounted for about 15%, and the remaining 8 More than half are in Japanese or a mixture of Japanese and English, which shows how much research is conducted and published in Japanese. We started with the hypothesis that there is a need for these preprints, and of course we started by interviewing researchers involved. There are other regional preprint servers around the world, but some have closed down due to financial problems, so we think there is also the advantage that a high-level institution like JST can operate it, which will enable stable operation.

As of July 5th, there have been many more submissions, but 378 preprints have been published. This is shown by field, and it is clear that the fields where preprints have traditionally been used are the ones where they are most frequently published. For example, physics, meteorology, and if you go down there is information science, and on the right there is life science, and at the bottom on the right there is business administration. Actually, there are journals on JST that recommend preprints, which is why the number is so high, but we are also hoping for collaboration with such journals in the future. At first, I imagined that there would be far more submissions in Japanese, but surprisingly, there are also many submissions in English, so it's fairly balanced.

To find out who is using it, this graph shows the cumulative period of affiliation of the authors. More than half of the submissions are from universities, but 1g and 2G are the categories for grouping when analyzing the steps, and 1g has the most published papers, so the number is small, and these are divided into four groups from 1g to 4G. When we first started, there were many universities in the 1st and 2g groups, but now it is being used all over the place, which we take as a good thing because it is being used by researchers from a variety of institutions. We accept submissions from public research institutions and companies, as well as from overseas. As I mentioned earlier, the first place to submit a research paper is Platov.

To show what can be published, we have established terms of use and guidelines. I'll introduce a few of them. However, these are requirements regarding the content. Papers must use scientific methods and logic, and they must be original. Furthermore, it is necessary that the rights related to the copyrighted work are in order, so we have also established rules regarding the external handling of such matters.

Basically, we ask that you publish the paper before submission, or before the reader comments are incorporated. However, we have received requests from users to publish versions that reflect income, such as the author's final proofreading. So, in March, we made a major revision to the terms of use, and at that time, the journal... We have changed our policy so that if we can obtain permission to clarify the rights and other related matters, we can publish the current version. As a result, we believe this can serve as one of the platforms for open access.

Also, there has been a desire to publish translated versions, so we have responded to that by making it possible to publish translated versions. This is because it is difficult to ensure that the rights and other related matters with the journal, as well as the content of the two language versions, are the same. However, we will publish them if the authors provide such a guarantee. We will publish only those that meet these requirements, and we have created a screening system for this purpose. It is not a matter of differences, so the screening is mainly focused on external checks, but we also perform marking checks and so on.

However, in order to confirm that the research uses scientific methods and logic, knowledge of the field is sometimes necessary, so we are working in cooperation with field personnel and experts, and if there are no problems, we will publish it within 48 hours. First of all, within JST, there is an administrator for this JST division, but there are experts both inside and outside JST who cooperate with us, and we conduct checks and screenings in collaboration with them. I would like to mention two things that we find difficult. First, as I mentioned earlier, the content must be scientific. For example, if it does not take into account any prior research and has no references or branches, or if it is just the author's random thoughts, then it cannot be published.

However, the difficulty lies in having to carefully judge whether it is acceptable to publish it by comparing it with the screening rules, as it is a public platform. Also, although the lower part has the external requirements of a paper, it is quite difficult to determine whether it should be kept confidential if it is likely to cause problems when published, such as defamation or libel against an individual, or if it has ethical or legal issues, or if it is like advertising disguised as research and development, or there are many other things as well. However, we are working closely with experts and are carefully addressing this issue now. I think this kind of problem is quite common even with journal submissions, but the difficulty of being a preprint server is that we want to contribute to new scientific developments by publishing a wide range of content, including material that has not been published in journals before. Ensuring that this is possible while still publishing is difficult.

Earlier, I showed you the statistics of contributors, and while most of them are from research institutions, there are also individual contributors. As expected, there are many papers from individuals that do not meet these requirements, so it is quite difficult. That's why I would be grateful if you could share your thoughts on how we can make this accessible to the public and ensure its quality. In addition, to increase submissions, we are collaborating with journals and asking them to include information about preprints in their submission guidelines, and we are creating pages that list journals that do so. And lastly, 。 English: Well, actually, in February, the country announced an immediate open access policy, and for some programs of public research results, it will be made immediately open access, starting with research that begins next year.

However, in this momentum to promote open access, I think the Tax Stock Department can also play a role. I would be grateful if you would take a look or submit your work. That's all, thank you. [Applause] Well, and have any Thank you. My name is Mieto, and I do research on the decentralization of arts at the University of Tokyo.

Well, when it comes to preprints, what I'm always concerned about is the exposure, or whether it will become a document that can be appealed to the world externally. So, there are open access databases, academic literature databases such as OpenALX and Dimensions, but what kind of collaboration with them is currently underway? Thank you for your question. External I think integration with database discovery services is very important, and as I mentioned earlier, J-Stage has many integrations with Dimensions and other services, but regarding the J-Stage section, although we've been discussing it, the number of submissions is still small, so it's not yet at the stage where we can integrate the system. However, we are currently providing information to Japan and also to Google, and we would like to gradually increase that.

We have n't yet integrated with OpenAlexa, but we would like to expand that in the future. [Applause]