It is important to promote open science by making it easier to publish and access research articles. This will contribute to solving urgent global issues, such as global warming and new coronavirus pandemics. The communique issued by the G7 science and technology ministers' conference in May 2023 states, “The G7 will collaborate in expanding open science with equitable dissemination of scientific knowledge and publicly funded research outputs, including research data and scholarly publications.” This prompted Japan to take initiatives to promote open science. For example, the Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (CSTI) is considering requiring authors whose work is publicly funded the immediate open access of the final, peer-reviewed manuscripts of their research papers. This plan is expected to be implemented starting with 2025 public funding recipients.
Since 2008, STAM has been making its issues available as gold open access publications to allow its readers to access them for free. This pioneering initiative, among other efforts, has been made to promote open science by disseminating the latest materials science research worldwide. Many other scientific journals have since adopted open access models. However, this has significantly increased the financial burden on authors as they have to pay APCs to cover the loss of subscription-based revenue. This impedes equitable research publication opportunities.
To address this issue, NIMS and Empa are cosponsoring STAM’s APC-free publishing campaign. Simultaneously offering publication fee exemptions and open access services is expected to promote more equitable opportunities to publish and access research outputs. NIMS will help popularize open science through STAM’s APC-free publishing campaign.
