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In this blog, Rebecca Lawrence, Managing Director at F1000 Research Ltd, discusses how the University of Tsukuba are demonstrating leadership and innovation in not only embracing Open Research publishing practices but also by establishing our first partnership to offer a full bi-lingual publishing service.

I am very excited to announce today that we are collaborating with the University of Tsukuba to help them lead the way in Open Research and Open Scholarship in Japan, by establishing the first open research publishing gateway to publish in both English and Japanese.

Over the past few years, there have been huge strides towards open research around the world. The 2016 Amsterdam Call for Open Science led the way for a raft of initiatives across Europe to rethink how research is conducted and disseminated, and how researchers and their institutions are rewarded and incentivized.

Across the world, and notably in the US and China, there has been significant momentum in the development of policies designed to ensure full open access to new research. Increasingly today, open access policies are accompanied by requirements to provide access to any data, code and resources that underpin research findings, to better support the use and reuse of those discoveries so that we can build on those findings to enable the next big discoveries and innovations.

The University of Tsukuba have therefore shown real leadership and innovation in not only embracing open research publishing practices but also establishing our first partnership to offer a full bi-lingual service. Their gateway, which is due to launch in November 2020, will be hosted on the F1000Research site and will adopt its pioneering approach to open science publishing. It will cover all fields in the physical, biological, medical, and social sciences, arts and humanities, in all forms, from traditional research articles to protocols, registered reports, data notes, case studies and much more. All outputs will be published open access, so free for anyone to read and, excitingly, will provide the option to publish in either English or Japanese, with an initial focus on the humanities and social science fields.

This is a very important collaboration for us, providing an opportunity to work together to learn and evolve our model so that open research publishing models can better serve the scholarly community. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to work with colleagues at the University and look forward to supporting their researchers in maximizing the reach and impact of their scholarly outputs.

We believe that research and scholarship, and indeed language, should have no barriers and we look forward to continuing to adapt our model to ensure it best meets the needs of the communities that we serve. In addition, with an initial focus on the humanities and social science fields, the University of Tsukuba gateway has the potential to help revolutionise how the results of research in Japan are disseminated.