Science and Technology of Advanced Materials (STAM), which is an international academic journal in materials science, celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2009. The journal was founded in 1999 by the members of materials science related academic societies, in response to the momentum toward the creation of an international, high-profile, professional journal in Japan, a country leading the research in materials science. Most Japanese academic journals are published by academic societies as part of their activities; members support the review and editing of the papers as their community activities, and these academic societies gain profit or improve their social profile through the journal publication. STAM stands in a unique position in that the entire process of publication and management is carried out, in practice, by the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), although STAM is a product of the cooperation between NIMS and several academic societies. NIMS not only carries out research studies but also foster information dissemination research their achievements as the only institute specializing in materials science in Japan. The publication of an academic journal is thus considered as a core infrastructure development of NIMS. The goals of STAM are to publish review papers on marked achievements and progress in research and to share them in a community of materials scientists using the NIMS network and collaborative institutions at home and abroad, under the enthusiastic leadership of the NIMS President. To this end, NIMS, despite its institutional nature, must maintain the editorial operation and stable publication of STAM. Through a stepwise improvement of its operation and editorial system, STAM evolved from a subscription-based journal to an institute-supported open-access journal in January 2008. This indicates a change in emphasis from quantity, i.e., the number of papers, to quality, as the journal aims to include only papers essential to materials researchers. STAM adopts the model of a journal led by a community of researchers, in which scientists can freely report and review their achievements (free to submit), read papers (free to read), and obtain the copyright themselves (author-friendly copyright). The perspective from the time of creation to the maturation of STAM is overviewed by comparing STAM with New Journal of Physics (published by Institute of Physics Publishing), the academic journal launched in England before STAM with the same principle and one of the successful open-access journal models.

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This paper introduces the Patent Mining Tasks of the Seventh and Eighth NTCIR Workshops and the test collections produced in these tasks. The task's goal is the creation of technical trend maps from a set of research papers and patents in a particular research field. In this paper, we explain two subtasks: (1) research papers classification and (2) technical trend maps creation, which are conducted in the Patent Mining Task. We also show a system that classifies research papers into the International Patent Classification (IPC) system, which is a global standard hierarchical patent classification system.

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In March 2009, the Japan Patent Office launched the “Patent Search Portal Site” in its website for the purpose of offering various information pertinent to the patent prior art search in consolidated form. This portal site is equipped with the necessary knowledge and technical skills for the prior art search, teaching materials for studying the method and strategic view thereof, and various tools for acquiring the search key information. This article introduces the outline of this portal site featuring on the teaching materials and the newly offered tool.

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On September 10, 2008, the Japan Patent Office (JPO) launched the “Patent Strategy Portal Site” on the homepage in order to provide the information which is useful for improving technology management capability and deciding intellectual property strategies. The site provides domestic and overseas information, related to patent acquisition, technology trends and statistics, the promotion of the effective utilization of patent information, and patent licensing etc. The site also provides “self-analysis data” by which they are able to process, extract and interannually compare the number of their own patent applications and examination results etc. In this article, the outlines of the Patent Strategy Portal Site are described.

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In March 2007, ISTIC and Wanfang Data jointly launched a Chinese DOI Registration Agency. The two organizations conducted R&D on DOI and developed a platform namely a Chinese DOI Registration Center to promote and spread Chinese DOI. In addition, they have carried out some relevant research projects in domestic and international cooperation centering on the DOI platform. In this article, we firstly introduced a general strategic view of the projects related to Chinese DOI where ISTIC and Wanfang Data took the lead. Secondly, we introduced some national projects and standardization activities related to Chinese DOI. The projects include R&D on the Chinese DOI system, an international collaboration with American CNRI Handle System, the Key STM Journal Project of the Ministry of Scientific and Technology of the PRC, a preliminary study of the "digital object identifier" standard system of the General Administration of Press and Publication of the PRC, copyright protection studies of Copyright Protection Center of China based on DOI. Lastly, we summarized the current problems and future prospects.

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