Open Access Week Events: Otaru University of Commerce and Hokkaido University.
As part of Open Access Week, both Otaru University of Commerce and Hokkaido
University (Otaru is the smallest University in Japan, based in Otaru on
Hokkaido, thirty minutes train journey from Sapporo, where one of the largest
Japanese universities, Hokkaido University, is based) ran events promoting
their respective institutional archives. Kindly supported by a grant from
Osaka University, they invited me to give a talk at each event. After some
discussion with Sugita-san from Otaru's library and repository team and
Suzuki-san from Hokkaido's library and repository team, we decided on the
focus of "maximizing the impact of your research". Both meetings also
included local staff speaking in Japanese introducing the institutional
repository and/or their usage of it.
Otaru University's repository is called Barrel (the kanji characters for the
town of Otaru mean "small barrel") while Hokkaido's is called HUSCAP, which
is also the name of a small relatively rare berry which grows in Hokkaido
(nowhere else in Japan, though elsewhere in Northern Europe and Asia). HUSCAP
also stands for Hokkaido University Collection of Scholarly and Academic
Papers (yes, they know that doesn't quite spell the acronym).
The events were lightly attended, with around 20 people at Otaru and around
40 at Hokkaido (given their respective size, the Otaru one was a larger
proportion of their staff) with a mix of younger and older researchers
including PhD students and even the odd non-University person.
Hokkaido videoed their event and plan to put the video and associated slides
in HUSCAP. I will post the URL here when I get a copy.
My slides and PDF and SVG versions of the main graphics demonstrating the
access problem and the OA solution, as available in the OpenDepot:
http://opendepot.org/373/
So far, Japanese academic politics has resisted any university adopting a
proper deposit mandate, so far as I know. Hokkaido University policy strongly
recommends deposit, but so far as I can tell this is only achieving the usual
15-30% spontaneous deposit rates seen elsewhere.
I have been invited also to talk at two further events in Japan this year,
promoting Open Access and talking about my experiences at the University of
Reading where I was one of a team of OA enthusiasts who eventually persuaded
the university management to adopt a near-optimal mandate. These events are:
DRF 7th Workshop
25th November 2010
Pacifico Yokohama, Yokohama
SPARC Japan/JANUL joint symposium
10th December 2010
University of Tokyo
--
Professor Andrew A Adams aaa_at_meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/
Received on Fri Oct 22 2010 - 11:29:40 BST