Photo: zVg

Kathleen Shearer is the executive director of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories in Canada. In an article in Nature, she’s praised the Japanese approach to open access. Japan’s government is investing USD 63 million in websites run by its research institutions that are used as repositories for scientific publications and datasets. The aim is for researchers to be compelled to publish all their work in freely accessible form as of April 2025. Shearer is impressed by the plan, because “it doesn’t matter where you publish, whether you pay article processing charges or not”. What’s more, this focus on Japanese repositories is also supporting research published in the Japanese language.