Information Exchange with Osaka University

This morning the University of Edinburgh’s Scholarly Communications Team was delighted to receive a delegation of guests who have travelled all the way from Osaka University in Japan. Xin Yao and Tomoko Ohya are based in the University’s Support Office for Large-Scale Education and Research Projects. They were joined by Shotaro Hidaka who is Osaka University Library’s Serials & Electronic Resources Librarian, and Mami Yamamoto from the Finance Office.

The morning kicked off with an introduction from our Director of Library & University Collections, Jeremy Upton. After this, Head of Research & Learning Services Stuart Lewis talked through Edinburgh University’s activities in the Research Data Management arena, aided by a presentation in Japanese. Following this, we spent some time talking about Open Access to research publications and exchanging ideas about how to gain academic engagement with an institutional repository. It seems that many of the issues are the same in Japan as in the UK (expensive journal packages, lack of academic engagement with Open Access). As well as these main topics of discussion, we also spent time discussing funding streams for university libraries, roles & responsibilities of liaison librarians, library opening hours late-night service provision.

We certainly found this to be an interesting meeting with very stimulating discussion – and we hope to stay in touch about many of the items we discussed.