The heart of modern scholarly communication is refereed journal which serves four key functions; “registration”, “preservation”, “certification” and “dissemination”. The diversification of scholarly communication means the diversification of how to realize these four functions. This diversification includes adding non-paper items to the subject matter handled by the four functions, changing the way some functions are performed, making some functions independent of journals and swapping the order in which functions are performed. On the other hand, reviewing the need for the four functions has been proposed but not widespread. By looking at specific examples of each, this paper tries to capture the current state of diversification of scholarly communication.

This article discusses the history of scientific journals and the development of their review systems. It emphasizes the importance of historical perspective in studying the subjects like “science” or “scientific journal” and reviews the history of scientific journals and the development of the review systems using relatively recent studies on the subjects. It ends by discussing some of the current challenges. In particular, it presents some of the findings in the recently published book on the Royal Society’s scientific publishing by Aileen Fyfe and others.

There is a growing movement in academia towards the online publishing of non-peer reviewed ‘preprints’, in order to share results with the research community as quickly as possible. Several preprint servers have been established in the past decade, and in March 2022 Japan too launched the preprint server ‘Jxiv’ operated by the Japan Science and Technology Agency. By responding appropriately to this expanding use of preprints, publishers and researchers can contribute to better scholarly communication and widespread benefits for academia as a whole.

This paper describes the University of Tsukuba’s efforts to visualize research in the humanities and social sciences written in Japanese. First, iMD (index for Measuring Diversity) is a unique initiative by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) and a method we proposed and patented for measuring the diversity of author affiliations in academic journals as well as an internal evaluation index at the HSS. The other is the University of Tsukuba Gateway (UoTG), developed on the F1000 Research platform to promote the publication of research results throughout the university. This paper outlines the process of rebranding the UoTG two years after its launch and introducing it as the Japan Institutional Gateway, as well as its prospects.

The conventional scholarly communication system focusing on journal articles has led to the rise of research evaluation based on publication indicators, causing the scientific community to lose its autonomy and to adapt to such metrics. In recent years, there has been a movement to redress this situation. DORA, the flagship of this movement, has evolved its role from advocacy to active campaigning. In Europe, this trend has merged with the open science initiatives, and the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment is in the process of calling for endorsements. This paper discusses the recent initiatives by DORA and the European movement. It also examines the status of Japan’s use of assessment metrics while introducing the community engagement projects of DORA.