Syun,
You appear to be falling into the Nihonjinron trap in believing that Japan is
unique. Japanese academia, while having some difficult problems in its
relationship with worldwide academia and international publication of
results, nevertheless seems to me to be in the same boat as everywhere else.
As Stevan has otherwise pointed out, the logical analysis of the Japanese
situation is that immense efforts at persuasion to faculty will result in a
modest increase in the deposit rate, but only to a maximum of perhaps 30%.
Better than the non-encouraged 15% perhaps but still far too low. These
persuasion efforts would be much better aimed at the meta-level adoption of a
deposit mandate (or whatever the acceptable term is - at University of
Reading it's not called a mandate because the senior management have poor
relations with their staff generally and the term "mandate" is neither in
keeping with general usage nor likely to produce acceptance, however the
publication deposit policy is a mandate by any other name). Japanese
universities are moving towards greater requirements on their academics to
publish in international journals in English. Alongside these moves, we
should be promoting the adoption of a deposit mandate to ensure the broadest
impact of these articles. Given how bureaucratic Japanese universities are,
this minor requirements, which can be demonstrated to produce direct benefit
to the author (where most of the bureaucratic rules in Japanese universities
can't) I feel that adoption of mandates should be no more difficult than
elsewhere, provided the advocacy of mandates is clear and targetted: deposit
mandates are the only demonstrated way of maximizing research impact
internationally (and Japanese universities are being strongly pushed by the
government to demonstrate international impact these days).
--
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 Sun Sep 19 2010 - 08:44:58 BST