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
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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