K. M. Lawson, The Japan Memory Project, Frog in a Well, October 17, 2004. A blog posting. Excerpt: "Three visiting scholars (Sakakibara Sayoko, Roy Ron, and Wakabayashi Haruko) from the University of Tokyo's Historiographical Institute gave a talk this week at Harvard about their massive Japan Memory Project. The project consists of a collection of online databases of mostly pre-modern primary sources....Many of these sources have been digitized through the project and their indexes can be searched online. Also, many of the documents, maps and other visual sources can be viewed and downloaded directly from their site, but depending on the database, may only be available to scholars visiting the institute....The presenters argued that over the last few years there has been a considerable shift in the thinking of the institute towards moving materials online and providing more open access to these materials. Whereas getting into the institute in the past was apparently something of considerable difficulty, now anyone working with a professor and university they 'recognize' can get access by filling out an application. While I still find this elitist for an institute which is close to being a public Japanese archive (their handout says that the 'responsibility for compiling historical materials [was] transferred from the Cabinet' to the university in 1888), I'm glad that things are gradually opening up."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/17/2004 09:01:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
