Japan should inject substantial financial resources into the information infrastructure without delay. Western countries are competing to establish large-scale digital archives of cultural resources. There are many valuable digital archival activities in Japan, too, but many of them are facing three obstacles: money, manpower and copyright. Mass-digitization of cultural resources confronts too much copyright transaction costs. Especially the problem of "orphan works" is serious, and many western countries are adopting various measures. Japan should take effective measures including (a) comprehensive intellectual property rights database; (b) diffusion of public license; and (c) new legal framework to deal with rights clearance for archives.
JAICI (Japan Association for International Chemical Information) has been endeavoring to raise many infopros through marketing and user support of STN/SciFinder and preparing CA abstracts and indexes for more than 30 years and prior arts search for patent examination on behalf of Japan Patent Office for almost 10 years. Recently, JAICI has started a new business, search service for focusing on patent search for private sectors, which is our new challenge for raising all-round infopros. Backgrounds and processes are described as an example of infopro-education in chemistry and its related fields.
Recently, a form of "Flipped Classroom" is already generating a lot of attention. Utilizing tablet PC, open educational resources (OER) and internet, the practices introducing Flipped Classroom is spreading in an elementary and secondary education. Flipped Classroom is expected to improve student outcomes. This article explains a brief overview of Flipped Classroom and dissemination of information technology which assists its introduction. In addition, it explains the possibilities and challenges for its integration in a real-world classroom situation.
For the sake of providing evidences that contribute to policy making or strategy planning in a Japanese version of the NIH and pharmaceutical companies,we tried an overview and future prospects of pharmaceutical industry based on new indicators. Focusing on the sizes and categories of the entities possessing pipelines, we analyzed who the key entity is in terms of drug R&D. Results show that the SMEs and ventures give strong advantage in the drug R&D in U. S.. On the other hand, the SMEs and ventures in Japan do not play a vital role like those in U. S. do.
This article examines the features of national research integrity system (NRIS) - a nationwide system as defined herein to ensure research integrity leading to scientific fraud reduction - of foreign countries based on published literatures to help study effective ways of attaining said goals in Japan. From prior global NRIS comparative studies recently made available, we classified the system from selected countries to find that not many countries fall under a category of "having an office of research integrity with legal investigation authority" like the United States. We further made a panoramic analysis of relationship between the cases of research misconduct and characteristics of R&D programs and research integrity system of leading countries. The result indicated the importance of building a distinctive research integrity system that reflects country-specific features.