(22 May 2025) All presentations are online and the recordings from the meeting will be made available in mid-June 2025.
The COAR Conference took place in Tokyo, Japan on May 12-15, 2025 and was attended by approximately 140 people representing at least 23 different countries. The meeting was jointly organized by COAR, JPCOAR, and the National Institute of Informatics (NII) and provided an opportunity to learn more about the current open science landscape in Japan as well as exchange with others about national and regional trends, challenges, and strategies for repositories and repository networks.
Conference participants heard that in Japan, an open access policy has recently come into effect that requires researchers to deposit their published articles into a Japanese repository. Japan has a very robust repository network of about 700 repositories, many of which are hosted by the NII national infrastructure and JPCOAR, a large community of repository managers, has taken on an active role in helping to raise awareness of the policy on their campuses.
The infrastructure in Japan for open science is very robust because of significant investments made over the last decade, with well-developed data and institutional repositories. However, like in many countries, open science requires a cultural change. Japanese researchers are not yet fully aware of the requirements of the policy and there is significant work to be done to socialize the policy within the research community. There are also challenges related to integrating Japanese research outputs into the international corpus of scientific knowledge because of the distinct aspects of the Japanese language and non-latin characters.
Read more about the highlight of the conference here.
