Japan has launched a preprint sever to call attention to research produced in the country, Nature News reports.
It adds that the Japan Science and Technology Agency launched Jxiv in March to house preprints of scholarly articles in English or Japanese on range of topics, from history to linguistics and business. Soichi Kubota from JST tells Nature News that Japan has one of the high global research outputs but that Japanese researchers rarely post their work to preprint servers, which this effort aims to change.
But Nature News notes that in its first few months of operation, only about 40 manuscripts have been posted to Jxiv, suggesting that uptake of the preprint server may be low or slow. But because the effort is government-backed, it adds that proponents of the effort say the idea of depositing manuscripts to a preprint server may eventually grow on researchers.