> it also said that it would invest 10 billion yen (around US$63 million) to standardize institutional repositories — websites dedicated to hosting scientific papers, their underlying data and other materials — ensuring that there will be a mechanism for making research in Japan open.
The important part isn't necessarily the papers, it's getting access to the data. I'll note that the hurdle for open access is not a lack of support from funders or from the government, it's from researchers. Researchers want everybody's else's data, but they don't want to give their data to anybody else, because they want to be the ones to publish on it. It's IP. It can take years to get access to a dataset, because the owners throw every obstacle in your way, and drag their feet as much as possible—it makes cancelling a gym membership look easy. And I am speaking about projects where open access is written into the funding as a requirement.
My point is that I'd be interested to know what data governance processes they're putting in place if all the data is being consolidated into a single system, as the article says it is.
I recall a paper that sought to explore how willing authors were to release data when they had published open access and stated 'data available on request'. Iirc it was below 50% that responded with data. See related here; https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/jbu9r/
The important part isn't necessarily the papers, it's getting access to the data. I'll note that the hurdle for open access is not a lack of support from funders or from the government, it's from researchers. Researchers want everybody's else's data, but they don't want to give their data to anybody else, because they want to be the ones to publish on it. It's IP. It can take years to get access to a dataset, because the owners throw every obstacle in your way, and drag their feet as much as possible—it makes cancelling a gym membership look easy. And I am speaking about projects where open access is written into the funding as a requirement.
My point is that I'd be interested to know what data governance processes they're putting in place if all the data is being consolidated into a single system, as the article says it is.