Japan Now Requires Immediate Open Access for Publicly Funded Research

It applies to newly solicited projects from FY2025 onwards. A grant awarded under earlier terms continues under those terms. If you hold both, the simplest position is to apply the stricter behaviour to everything rather than maintaining two processes, because immediate deposit costs nothing and tracking which paper belongs to which grant is where mistakes happen.

JSPS KAKENHI, JST — including Strategic Basic Research and FOREST — and AMED. Between them they account for most competitive research funding held by Japanese researchers in the sciences and biomedicine.

No. Depositing in your institutional repository, or in a disciplinary repository such as Jxiv or one operated by JST, satisfies the requirement without any charge. Gold open access is a permitted route rather than a required one, and the distinction is worth a great deal of money over a career.

The open-access status of your publications, with the DOI or the URL where each one is openly available. It is a small ask that has a large effect, because it makes an undeposited paper visible at a fixed point every year rather than never.

The obligation is the same, and the practical question becomes the journal’s self-archiving terms: which version you may deposit, and how soon. Most international journals permit deposit of the accepted manuscript, but the conditions vary enough that it is worth checking before submission rather than at acceptance.

Yes. The work is journal selection with the deposit terms checked, the manuscript prepared so the accepted version is usable, and the funding and licence statements written to match. We do that for researchers in Japan the same way we do it everywhere else, in English or alongside your own Japanese-language reporting.