The National Institute of Informatics (NII), part of the Research Organization of Information and Systems (ROIS), led by Director-General Sadao Kurohashi, has integrated metadata from its Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) into OpenAlex, one of the world's largest open scholarly information databases.
As of August 18, 2026, metadata for nearly 4 million research outputs collected through IRDB is freely available to researchers and the public worldwide via OpenAlex.
IRDB is NII's core scholarly information infrastructure, aggregating metadata from institutional repositories developed and operated by universities and research institutions throughout Japan. With the integration of metadata stored in IRDB into OpenAlex, one of the world's largest open scholarly information databases, Japanese research outputs have become widely available through OpenAlex, significantly enhancing their discoverability and reuse.
This collaboration is driven by the strategic goal of promoting open access to diverse research outputs, including scholarly publications and research data, through Japan's institutional repositories, while maximizing the discoverability of Japanese research outputs within the global scholarly information infrastructure. This initiative is based on the Basic Policy on Promoting Open Access to Publicly Funded Scholarly Publications and Scientific Data, adopted by the Cabinet Office's Integrated Innovation Strategy Promotion Council in February 2024. It will help transform Japanese research outputs into "machine-actionable knowledge assets" for the AI era.
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