Recently I was looking into what SPARC Japan http://www.nii.ac.jp/sparc/ has been doing recently as part of the global effort, SPARC, to address imbalances in the scholarly communication system and provide better access to research results. Progress is continuing at an impressive level!
What does this mean for researchers? Be sure to do an online search in the Japanese WWW when you are looking for scholarly articles before making an inter-library loan request! Sometimes (not always….) you can find the article online.
National Diet Library’s PORTA — searches across databases to make it easy to find materials that might not show up on a web search through Google. A list of archives included in its searches is available. Using PORTA helps save time in searching across multiple archives and databases.
With the National Institute for Informatics — through its Next Generation Academic Information Infrastructure initiative — playing a leadership role in SPARC Japan, many Japanese universities and scholarly societies improving access to Japanese scholarly journals and other publications. That is why we can find so much so easily on the internet now.
There was an update recently to NII’s list of institutional repositories in Japan, bringing the number up to 133. These are really valuable resources. Institutional repositories can be searched in JAIRO, which is also included in NDL’s PORTA that was mentioned above.
The Japanese Science and Technology Agency provides JStage , the Japanese Science and Technology Information Aggregator, Electronic, with extensive backfiles of Japanese scientific journals in many fields. JSTAGE is also available in NDL’s PORTA. Some sources are only available to subscribers.
In 2009 the Japanese Diet extended the National Diet Library’s role as a national repository for digitized information. A summary of recent developments is available in NDL Director Makoto Nagao’s annual report to the Conference of Directors of National Libraries.
National Diet Library’s Research NAVI page provides a convenient access point to its resources and services, with substantial information available (in Japanese) to guide in finding resources by subject, format, etc.
Although Open Access is very widespread in Japan, there is still a lot of information available only in print — or through subscription. The information infrastructure is challenging to navigate!
