Research data management (RDM) is positioned as an important process to support research data sharing and publishing in open science. The Institutional Repositories Promotion Committee and its successor, the JPCOAR : Japan Consortium for Open Access Repository, have been working on the development of RDM educational materials for research supporters since 2015 as a way to promote RDM in Japan. In this paper, we introduce the development process of two educational materials, “RDM Training Tool” and “RDM Service : Design and Practice”. Also, we introduce the video teaching materials created in collaboration with the National Institute of Informatics as an example of the use of the two educational materials.

Upon the stipulation of Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research in 2007, universities in Australia have been taking the lead of research data management (RDM) services. This paper explores how they conduct RDM services in university library through experiences with Sydney university library staff in 2017 and 2019. Sydney university has implemented the services such as RDM plan, university policy, platforms and procedures in making research data openly available through RDM site. Also relationship with ANDS is mentioned here.

This year, the Cabinet Office announced the Fifth Science and Technology Basic Plan, and proposed Society 5.0 as a future society that Japan should aim for. In Society 5.0, technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) are scheduled to create new value while responding to various needs of people. Meanwhile, there are laws (so-called creation law) to protect the creation of human in our country. At the time of enactment of the law, creative activities by non-human beings like AI were not supposed. So, how will AI products be legally handled? In this paper, I consider the current state and issues of intellectual property rights especially Copy right Act concerning what was generated by AI (AI products), and investigate countermeasures.

Aizuwakamatsu City, Fukushima Prefecture, is collaborating with Accenture on a smart city project aiming to develop new big data/analytics industry in the region. This article introduces the uniqueness of the smart city project, as well as its future vision. The key factors of the city's initiative are organizations, human resources and data infrastructure with the University of Aizu playing a vital role in collaborating with the city and Accenture. As various pilot projects are conducted on Aizuwakamatsu's journey to becoming a smart city, it is attracting an increasing number of companies, talents and industries. The city aims to tackle challenging issues like open governance, privacy concerns and competitiveness, to accelerate the smart city initiatives and eventually expand them into other regions.

With the increase in the number of SNS users, the increase and diversification of Internet services used by individuals and the spread of cloud services, the handling of digital data of the deceased has recently become a focus of attention. In Japan, there is no unified legal system regarding the digital data of the deceased. The EU's GDPR and Japan's Personal Information Protection Law, in principle, limit the scope of protection to the deceased. In contrast, in the US, many states recognize the right of publicity of the deceased. This paper compares the legal systems of various countries regarding the handling of digital data of the deceased, and examines how users should deal with them.

The Systems and Information Science and Technology Unit is a unit that takes wide view of information processing technology (IT) at Center for Research and Development Strategy of Japan Science and Technology Agency. This paper describes the process for creating the panoramic view report issued in March 2019. IT research and development areas are classified based on social demands, social visions and technology trends, then 20 important themes are chosen by looking at the four categories, namely, artificial intelligence / big data, robotics, social systems science, and computing architecture. While the panoramic view report was written by members of the System and Information Science and Technology Unit, we aim for a highly convincing one by seeking input from outside experts and repeating discussions with them.

The Center for Research and Development Strategy (CRDS) carries out investigations and analyses of science and technology policies and trends in major countries (Japan, USA, EU, UK, Germany, France, China and Korea) and makes a panoramic view report titled “Research and Development Strategies in Major Countries” each year. The government strategy of research and development in Japan, is based on the “Science and Technology Basic Law” and the “Science and Technology Basic Plan”. Recent trends in Japan are: increasing public competitive research funds, industry-academia-government collaboration, and human resource development in cooperation with regional development. Major countries abroad are aiming to create innovation and to promote key technological fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum science with a different strategy. In this article, Science and Technology policies and trends in Japan, USA, EU, and China will be explained briefly.

The ratio of female researchers in Japan is significantly lower than in other countries. Over the past decade, various support has been provided for the balance research and childbirth/childcare so that female researchers can maximize their abilities. The ratio of female researchers is increasing, but still low compared to other countries. Many engineers and researchers are active in universities and research institutions, but the development of young researchers and research supporting staff is an important issue. The number of non-regular faculty members with term and postdoctoral researchers increased, and this situation is thought to influence international competition in science and technology.

This essay examines the Wikipedia community's relatively negative attitude toward biographical articles on women scientists, even though several Wikipedia projects have been introduced to counter this tendency. The article also presents ideas for improving the Wikipedia community's approach to gender bias. Wikipedia's gender bias has been often discussed by researchers and Wikipedians themselves, and some claim that the site does not cover women scientists properly. This essay introduces four well-known cases of gender bias and science on Wikipedia: Marie Curie, the Smithsonian Archives “editathon,” Donna Strickland, and Katie Bouman. It argues that not only Wikipedians, but also scientists themselves, must work to improve Wikipedia's articles about women scientists.

OpenStreetMap is a mapping project to make open geographical data of whole earth. It is a platform for everyone to edit and distribute their geospatial dataset under Open license. OpenStreetMap is growing continuously with the communities of mapping contributors on the globe. This paper is trying to describe it by several aspects such as community clusters, organizations and activity of various side.

Digital Typhoon is a typhoon big data project for collecting, integrating, analyzing and searching various data about typhoons. The uniqueness of the project is “search technologies for situational awareness” having disaster information in mind. Situational awareness is a decision making process for the next actions based on the current situation. To support agile and adaptive decision making, Digital Typhoon aims to build a hybrid of pull-based service to dig into the database as well as push-based service to deliver information to users. The paper introduces methods for modeling situations and metrics for ordering various types of data such as image data, trajectory data, observation data and textual data.

The National Institute of Informatics has been conducting an electronic library business since its predecessor, NACSIS. After cutting a printed academic journal and digitizing it with a scanner, it was given metadata and used for searching. Although it was an independent service as the electronic library service “NACSIS-ELS” at the beginning of operation, CiNii, one of the functions of the academic content portal “GeNii”, is responsible for the search part, and the electronic library function is Modifications that function as a backend were made. Later, as a measure of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the back-end part was transferred to J-STAGE, and CiNii specialized as a search service for articles as CiNii Articles.

This paper overviews digital archiving and preservation of cultural resources at museums, libraries and archives, which are called MLAs in this article, to help understand the basic features and issues of digital archiving and preservation of resources. This article first shows the definitions of terms used in the article, which are followed by sections to show backgrounds from retrospective viewpoints, important features of cultural resources and metadata for digital archiving. Then, this article presents digital preservation at MLAs and some metadata standards for digital preservation such as PREMIS and OAIS. Lastly, the concluding remarks for the future are presented.