According to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology's Academic Information Infrastructure Survey, the cost of library materials spent by national, public and private university libraries nationwide in 2017 was 0.8 billion yen, 713% less than the previous year.Of this amount, electronic journal expenses were only 297 billion yen, down 1.7% from the previous year.
According to the Ministry of Education, the breakdown of library material costs is 219 billion yen for national universities, 39 billion yen for public universities, and 454 billion yen for private universities.The number of national and private universities decreased for the second consecutive year, and the number of public universities increased slightly.
Of the library material costs, the cost of paper materials including books and magazines was 288 billion yen, a decrease of 4.6% from the previous year.The cost of materials for electronic media, including e-journals and e-books, was 313 billion yen, down 0.7% from the previous year.Of the electronic media, the cost of materials for electronic journals has consistently increased since 2004, when statistics were first collected, but it began to decline for the first time.
The number of e-journal titles available to foreign publishers in university libraries reached 133 million, an increase of 2.3% from the previous year.The number of e-journal titles purchased from non-overseas publishers was 289 million, an increase of 12.3% from the previous year.
The number of universities with institutional repositories that publish educational and research results free of charge on the Internet increased by 9.1% from the previous year to 585 schools have set up active learning spaces that enable learning styles in which multiple students gather and discuss while using various information resources.
