Status Quo and Issues of Open Access in Scholarly Research at Japanese Universities

This paper analyzes the status quo and current issues of open access (OA) in scholarly research at Japanese universities from governmental policies, the OA mandate for PhD theses, open-access scholarly articles in institutional repositories, and OA journals. The peculiarity of Japan´s OA policies are pointed out and a raised awareness on the part of Japanese scholars of the worldwide movement toward OA is called for. The need for a larger framework for OA that covers the particular case of Japan and opens a discussion on ideal scholarly communication in the digital age is proposed, as opposed to the conventionally used green-versus-gold OA framework designed to address the rising subscription costs of scholarly journals and conflicts between academia and commercial publishers.