Published papers

The authors analysed statistical data taken from the issues in 1960, 1965, 1970, 1975, and 1980 of Nippon no Toshokan (Annual statistics on libraries in Japan). The number of public libraries in prefecture, their holdings, annual acquisitions, and circulations were selected to re-present prefectural library activities and compared with the number of bookstores, their sales and the population of each prefecture. Results are: (1) a rapid growth is more evident in every item in the 1975-80 period than previous periods; (2) the growth rates of acquisitions and circulation are greater than those of the numbers of libraries and holdings; (3) almost all prefectures show growths in almost all items in the 1975-80 period; (4) a tendency toward concentration in the metropolitan prefectures is seen in the periods of 1965-1970 and 1970-1975, but such tendency terminates in the 1975-1980 period, especially in the numbers of libraries and acquisitions.

Introduction：This study clarifies the trends observed in open access (OA) in the biomedical field between 2006 and 2010, and explores the possible explanations for the differences in OA rates revealed in recent surveys. Methods：The study consists of a main survey and two supplementary surveys. In the main survey, a manual Google search was performed to investigate whether full-text versions of articles from PubMed were freely available. Target samples were articles published in 2005, 2007, and 2009; the searches were performed a year after publication in 2006, 2008, and 2010, respectively. Using the search results, we classified the OA provision methods into seven categories. The supplementary surveys calculated the OA rate using two search functions on PubMed: “LinkOut” and “Limits.” Results：The main survey concluded that the OA rate increased significantly between 2006 and 2010: the OA rate in 2010 (50.2%) was twice that in 2006 (26.3%). Furthermore, majority of OA articles were available from OA journal (OAJ) websites, indicating that OAJs have consistently been a significant contributor to OA throughout the period. OA availability through the PubMed Central (PMC) repository also increased significantly. OA rates obtained from two supplementary surveys were lower than those found in the main survey. “LinkOut” could find only 40% of OA articles in the main survey. Discussion：OA articles in the biomedical field have more than a 50% share. OA has been achieved through OAJs. The reason why the OA rates in our surveys are different from those in recent surveys seems to be the difference in sampling methods and verification procedures.

The Standing Committee for Research on Academic Libraries (SCREAL), in cooperation with 45 institutions in Japan, conducted a questionnaire survey from October to December 2011. As a result, 3,922 valid responses across various fields were collected. Following up this survey, we attempt here to clarify how usage and perception of ejournals and scholarly articles among researchers and graduate students in Japan changed. The basic findings were as follows. 1) More than 90% of respondents in natural sciences, including pharmaceutical science, chemistry, biology, physics and medicine, reported that they used e-journals at least once or twice a month. 2) Ejournals were not as heavily used in humanities and social sciences as in natural sciences, but the proportion of regular users turned out to be more than 4 times that of the 2001 survey. 3) This difference in e-journals usage by discipline is strongly associated with the degree of dependence on domestic documents written in Japanese. The two groups of respondents, users of international documents and users of domestic documents, showed a statistically significant difference in answering the question concerning "Frequency of e-journals use." 4) Attitude to the necessity of printed version drastically transmuted. 62.3% of respondents in natural sciences and 53.6% in humanities and social sciences thought "printed journals are unnecessary when e-journals are accessible." 5) Use of digital devices for e-books was not popular as yet, but the respondents expressed their high interest in the future use. Some preliminary discussion is made to identify the factors affecting the usage and/or perception of electronic resources by Japanese researchers.

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to explore the latest information-seeking behavior among health care consumers in Japan and to compare these behaviors with those recorded in similar surveys administered in Japan and the United States after 2000. Method: The authors conducted a randomized, population-based, door-to-door survey in 2008. A total of 1,200 Japanese adults over 15 years of age completed the questionnaire. Main Results: The results from 1,189 valid responses indicated that slightly more than half the number of participants had actively sought health information during the previous 2 years. Most seekers looked for information on a specific disease. “Physicians” remained the respondents' first choice as an information source, while “Internet” has gained greater popularity as a resource since the previous survey in 2000. Half the number of participants stated that they were willing to read academic or professional medical journal articles if written in Japanese and provided free of charge. Conclusion: The evidence indicates that Japanese health care consumers are now proactively seeking health information. These consumers feel reassured by the information they can access and would like to read clinical research in their native language.

Purpose: This paper describes the current state of electronic journal usage among Japanese medical researchers, and discusses the subsequent effect on users' decision whether to read articles on paper or on screen; from what types of full text source they obtain the articles. Methods: The names of 2,033 medical researchers affiliated with 80 medical schools in Japan were extracted and the researchers were surveyed. The questionnaire included questions on: 1) demographic features; 2) whether or not the researcher read the paper from print journals or electronic journals, and the search method used to obtain the most recently read articles; 3) the types of methods used to search for articles; 4) awareness and use of "open access" sites. Results: We received 651 responses (32.3%) between February and March 2007 and analyzed them. The major findings were: 1) 70% of the most recently read articles were electronic journal articles; 2) 80% of the electronic journal articles were provided by academic libraries, while 60% of print journal articles were from private subscription journals; 3) search engines were not used, but PubMed was used primarily to search either print or electronic journal articles; 4) in general, open access methods were not recognized by researchers as one possible route for obtaining the articles although PubMed Central constituted about 10% of the most recently read electronic journal articles; 5) no significant differences relating to article usage patterns were observed among age groups, however, large differences were found among fields of research.

This article aims to provide an overview of researchers’ practices and perceptions on data use and sharing. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 23 Japanese researchers in the natural sciences to identify their research practices and data use, including data sharing. We divided the interview scripts into meaningful phrases as a unit of analysis. Next, we focused on 406 statements on research data and reanalyzed them based on four aspects: stance on research data, practices and perceptions of data use, range of data sharing, and data type. A cluster analysis identified 14 clusters, which were divided into five groups: open access for data, restricted access for data, data interpretation, data processing and preservation, and data infrastructure. Our results reveal the complexity and diversity of the relationship between data and research practices. That is, the practice of research data sharing is heterogeneous, with no “one size fits all” between and among researchers.

Data sharing, which is hot issues in scholarly communication, is regarded as generating big data from little data in little science. In this article, a conceptual framework for research support platform in university is proposed, by the survey of two cases of representative and subject-based data archives in Japan; Data Integration and Analysis System Program (DIAS) and Inter-university Upper atmosphere Global Observation Network (IUGONET).

In today's digital age, daily reading may be becoming digital reading. To understand this possible shift from reading print media to reading digital media, we investigated reading behavior for 11 media and reading preferences between print and digital in different circumstances. In August 2012, an online survey was used to inquire about the reading behavior and preference of 1,755 participants, ranging in age from 18 to 69 years. The participants contained equal numbers of men and women from five age brackets. Our main finding was that approximately 70% of total reading time was spent on digital media and that preferences favored print media. Cluster analysis of reading time by media was used to categorize respondents into eight clusters, and a second cluster analysis on stated preference (digital or print) yielded six clusters. The correspondence analysis between reading behavior clusters and preference clusters revealed that there is a mismatch between reading behavior and stated preference for either print or digital media.

Academic social networking sites (ASNSs) are widely being adopted by individual academics. There has been an increasing research interest in this new phenomenon. This panel brings a group of researchers to share and discuss their recent research to address the research gaps in the following areas: (1) the institutional and disciplinary user structures and their behavior characteristics in ASNSs; and (2) how academics from non-English speaking countries use ASNSs and how the use may differ from their counterparts in U.S. Collectively, various studies presented in the panel will help achieve a better understanding of scholarly use of ASNSs in a broader scale.

The topic modeling approach can indicate hidden relationships between articles in a particular academic discipline. This study aims to examine topics in library and information science (LIS) using the latent Dirichlet allocation method. From representative five journals, 1,648 full-text articles were analyzed. We labeled 30 identified topics based on the top 10 highly weighted terms for each topic, title, and body of articles. From the topic mapping, commonly used methods and shift of research issues in LIS were found.

The purpose of this research is to identify topics in library and information science (LIS) using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and to visualize the knowledge structure of the field as consisting of specific topics and its transition from 2000–2002 to 2015–2017. The full text of 1648 research articles from five peer-reviewed representative LIS journals in these two periods was analyzed by using LDA. A total of 30 topics in each period were labeled based on the frequency of terms and the contents of the articles. These topics were plotted on a two-dimensional map using LDAvis and categorized based on their location and characteristics in the plots. Although research areas in some forms were persistent with which discovered in previous studies, they were crucial to the transition of the knowledge structure in LIS and had the following three features: (1) The Internet became the premise of research in LIS in 2015–2017. (2) Theoretical approach or empirical work can be considered as a factor in the transition of the knowledge structure in some categories. (3) The topic diversity of the five core LIS journals decreased from the 2000–2002 to 2015–2017.

Purpose: Information behavior has changed in recent years following the increase in economic activities based on access. Five types of information media use were categorized based on a previous study of ownership: ownership, quasi-ownership, and access types 1, 2, and 3. To clarify the current trends in media use, we conducted a survey of the current uses of four types of media: novels, nonfiction books, comics, and music. The respondents were categorized based on their information media use. Methods: An online panel survey was conducted in Japan with 1,030 participants who were counterbalanced by gender and age. The questions consist of 30 items related to media use, 5 related to physical media orientation, 3 related to frequency of media use, 2 related to possession and use of computer devices, and 10 related to personality. Results: Of the 30 questions on media use, more than half of the respondents answered "never/ don't know/no idea" to 27 questions. However, 41.9% of the respondents answered that they "very often/often" listen to music on free online video-sharing platforms such as YouTube. Seven clusters were identified based on hierarchical clustering from the answers for media use. The five clusters that indicated less use of information media were: "only YouTube," "nonuser," "library user," "music subscription user," and "ownership." The two respondent clusters that used information media frequently were: "active user of all media" and "active user (mainly access type 3)." The characteristics of the clusters were discussed.

While data sharing has received research interest in recent times, its real status remains unclear, owing to its ambiguous concept. To understand the current status of data sharing, this study examined primary reuse, data integration, and dataset release as the actual practices of data sharing. A total of 963 articles, chosen from those published in 2018 and registered in the Web of Science global citation database, were manually checked. Existing data were reused in the mode of data integration (13.3%) as frequently as they were for the mode of primary reuse (12.1%). Dataset release was the least common mode (9.0%). The results show the variation in data sharing and indicate the need for standardization of data description in articles based on thorough registration and expansion in public data archives to close the loop that results in the virtuous cycle of research data.

Open access (OA) is transforming scholarly communication. Various modes of OA implementation have emerged, which reflect the complexity surrounding OA development. This study aimed to examine this development from the perspective of how OA is implemented. The sample comprised 2,368 randomly selected articles published in 2013 and 2,999 published in 2018 indexed in the Web of Science. We also conducted searches in Google and Google Scholar in 2015 for articles published in 2013 and in 2020 for articles published in 2018. Selected articles were categorized as either an “OA article,” “electronic subscription journal article,” or “not available online.” OA articles were classified into 10 implementation modes: Gold, Hybrid, Delayed, Bronze, Subject Repositories, Institutional Repositories, Personal/Institutional Websites, Academic Social Networks (ASNs), Others, and Web Aggregator. Overall, 56.5% of all sampled articles in 2013 were available for free on at least one website in 2015, while 61.7% of all sampled articles in 2018 were freely available on at least one website in 2020. Concerning implementation mode, ASNs had the highest frequency (44.4% in 2015 and 56.0% in 2020), followed by Subject Repositories (35.0% in 2015 and 39.6% in 2020) and Gold (24.1% in 2015 and 37.4% in 2020). To obtain an overview of OA implementation, we conducted principal component analysis with OA implementation mode as the variable for both 2015 and 2020. The first principal component was the axis indicating the number of overlapping OA implementations for each article in 2015 and 2020, while the second principal component was the axis orthogonal to the first, which was difficult to interpret. We identified three groups of OA implementation in each plot of the principal component scores for articles in 2015 and 2020; however, the OA implementation of each group differed in 2015 and 2020. This diversity reflects the respective positions of various stakeholders regarding OA.