Representing Türkiye in Japan: Insights from the COAR 2025 Conference
Written by: Gültekin GÜRDAL, Library Director, IZTECH Library
This year, from May 12-15, 2025, I was in Tokyo, Japan, to attend the COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) 2025 Annual Meeting, hosted by the National Institute of Informatics (NII). This significant event was an international gathering addressing critical issues shaping the future of open-access repositories.
With approximately 140 participants from 23 different countries, I felt both a sense of sadness and immense pride to be the sole representative from Türkiye. I truly wish more representatives from our country could have been present. Nevertheless, I had the honor of representing Türkiye through two important presentations during the meeting.
What I Shared in My Presentations
In my first presentation, together with COAR’s new president, Isabel Bernar, I presented the work carried out by the COAR Controlled Vocabularies working group. I specifically shared how we adapted these vocabularies to GCRIS, the İzmir Institute of Technology Institutional Academic Repository, and detailed the example implementation process with the participants. In my other presentation, I discussed the developments in open access and institutional academic repositories in Turkey over the last 18 months. This session also provided a valuable opportunity to hear similar experiences from 12 other countries. Through these meetings and sessions, I gained crucial insights into the current state of institutional repositories worldwide, the challenges faced, the importance of standardization, and roadmaps for the future. I was also actively involved in shaping future initiatives.
All presentations are available online, and meeting recordings are expected to be shared by mid-June 2025.
The Open Science Ecosystem in Japan
Organized jointly by COAR, JPCOAR, and the National Institute of Informatics (NII), the meeting offered participants an opportunity to gain a close understanding of Japan’s open science ecosystem and exchange ideas on national and regional trends, challenges, and repository network strategies. At the conference, it was announced that a new open access policy has come into force in Japan, requiring researchers to upload their published articles to a Japanese repository. Japan has a robust repository network comprising approximately 700 institutional repositories. Most of these repositories are hosted on the national infrastructure provided by NII, and large repository manager communities like JPCOAR are responsible for promoting this policy on their campuses.
Japan’s open science infrastructure has developed significantly thanks to substantial investments over the past decade. However, like in many countries, the widespread adoption of open science requires a cultural shift. Japanese researchers are still not fully aware of the requirements of this new policy. Furthermore, the unique structure of the Japanese language and non-Latin characters make it challenging to integrate Japanese research outputs into the international scientific knowledge pool.
Open Science Worldwide: Three Key Trends
Presentations were also given from many countries and regions, including Spain, Canada, India, Czechia, Latin America, USA, South Korea, Africa, Türkiye, Australia, United Kingdom, France, and the European Union. Presenters were asked to explain the two most important recent developments related to open science in their countries and their impact on repositories. While the context of each country differed, three key trends emerged:
1. Institutional repositories have become the primary compliance mechanism for open access and open science policies. Previously, open access allowed for free choice between publishers or repositories, but now many policies directly mandate uploading articles to institutional repositories. This increases the value of repositories but also presents challenges for many repositories, such as increased workload, an uncertain copyright environment, and explaining policies to researchers.
2. Reform efforts in research evaluation systems have accelerated. There’s a need for evaluation systems that promote open science practices. Significant steps are being taken in this regard, especially in Europe. For example, in Spain, open science practices constitute 10% of the overall evaluation criteria.
3. Investments in local, publicly owned infrastructures are increasing. Due to the high costs of transformative agreements, countries are directing their investments toward open infrastructures. Institutional repositories reduce costs and prevent duplication by developing common solutions. Furthermore, efforts to increase the interoperability of different open science infrastructures enable the integration of publication and data repositories, open journal platforms, indexing services, and research evaluation systems.
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Open Repositories
Artificial intelligence was a significant topic on the conference agenda. The potential of large language models to make multilingual content accessible in different languages or to provide simplified summaries of research outputs was discussed. Additionally, the development of repository services through AI-driven metadata improvement, automatic matching of related content (author, funder, institution), and user interaction was evaluated.
On the other hand, repositories are increasingly becoming targets for AI bots that attempt to scrape their content. This can lead to service interruptions. A COAR survey showed that repositories are significantly affected by these bots. However, completely blocking bots can harm repositories’ mission of being open and accessible. Solutions like whitelisting and bot filtering were proposed to address these issues. COAR will establish a dedicated AI Bots Task Force in June 2025 to develop recommendations on this matter.
Despite these challenges, there’s a consensus within the community that open access repositories, due to their open nature, have a significant advantage over publishers in generating AI-driven scalable solutions.
Metadata and the PRC Model: Keys to the Future
Metadata forms the foundation of network-based services. High-quality services require high-quality metadata. The conference emphasized that many services, from access and discovery systems to research evaluations, reuse opportunities, and AI-supported analyses, rely on metadata and metadata quality. Despite automated improvement tools and integrations with Persistent Identifier (PID) systems, it was stated that repositories need to invest more in metadata curation for quality service production.
The Publish–Review–Curate (PRC) model is a new publishing approach where articles are first openly published in repositories and then subjected to a review process. COAR promotes this model as an innovative, low-cost, and technically accessible alternative to traditional diamond publishing. This model allows for the publication of different research outputs and alternative peer review processes. The COAR Notify protocol has been developed and widely adopted to ensure PRC processes work seamlessly across various infrastructures.
This meeting in Tokyo was extremely productive for understanding the global trajectory of open science and positioning Türkiye’s place within this process.
