The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology's 2016 Academic Information Infrastructure Survey revealed that among the material costs used in fiscal 2017 at national, public and private university libraries, the cost of electronic media exceeded that of paper media for the first time.The material cost itself has been on an increasing trend since 2013, but has started to decrease from the previous year.
According to the Ministry of Education, the cost of library materials in 2016 was 719 billion yen.It decreased by 27 billion yen (3.6%) from the previous year.The breakdown is 302 billion yen for paper media including books and magazines, and 315 billion yen for electronic media including electronic journals and e-books.Paper media decreased by 38 billion yen (11.1%) from the previous year, and electronic media increased by 10 billion yen (3.2%).
Most of the electronic media are purchased from overseas publishers at each university, reflecting the situation overseas where digitization is progressing more than in Japan, and at the same time, due to the peculiarity of the market where competition cannot be established without alternatives. The price seems to have risen.
Of this amount, the cost of electronic journals was 302 billion yen, an increase of 8 million yen (2.6%) from the previous year.The number of e-journal titles that can be viewed in university libraries is 388 million overseas and 47 domestic.
In addition, the number of universities that have institutional repositories that publish educational and research results free of charge on the Internet increased by 50 (10.3%) from the previous year to 536.The number of active learning spaces that encourage students to study independently has reached 65.4 schools, which is 512% of the total.
On the other hand, although security policies have been formulated at all national universities, 12.4% at public universities and 30.4% at private universities have not.
