Making Books Open Access: Interview series 2

Using KURA’s program to convert foreign-language books open access, more than 40 books/book chapters were made open access. In our interviews with researchers who used this program, we asked about the purpose and benefit of doing so.

Professor Yokochi Yuko, Graduate School of Letters

M.A. (Indian philosophy and literature), Graduate School of Humanities the University of Tokyo. Ph.D. (Indology), Graduate School of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Groningen. Served as associate professor at Kochi University of Technology before assuming her current position. Specializes in Sanskrit literature and the religious culture of ancient and medieval India. Using Purana literature, as well as historical and archaeological materials, she aims to reconstruct the history of Hinduism in the third to twelfth centuries, especially Shaivism and goddess worship.

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Professor Yokochi’s The Skandapurāṇa III Adhyāyas 34.1-61, 53-69: The Vindhyavāsinī Cycle (pub. Brill) and The Skandapurāṇa Volume IIb Adhyāyas 31-52: The Vāhana and Naraka Cycles (co-authored with Hans Bakker and Peter Bisschop; pub. Brill) were made open access in the 2019 and 2020 academic years, respectively. These are volumes 3 and 2b of the Skandapurāṇa Project, which is part of the Groningen Oriental Studies series.

■About This Book

——First, could you tell us about the Skandapurāṇa series? Yokochi: The Skandapurāṇa is one of the earliest Purana texts. It was composed around 600. The Puranas depict early Hindu myths and are similar to the Japanese Kojiki. They are also closely related to the Pashupata, an early religious group devoted to Shiva. There are two ninth-century manuscripts that have been passed down in Nepal, and these are the oldest of India’s Sanskrit epic/Purana manuscripts. One of them, the dated, was also a candidate for Nepal’s UNESCO cultural heritage (another ninth-century manuscript ended up being registered as such). The Skandapurāṇa Project was launched in the 1990s at University of Groningen in the Netherlands to create a critical edition of this work and research its formation, content, and transmission. Since then, the project has continued while changing core members. The current ones are Leiden University’s Professor Bisschop and me. Volumes 2b and 3 of the Skandapurāṇa series were made open access. Of the work’s 183 chapters, the former consists of critical editions of chapters 31 to 52, and the latter critical editions of the first half of chapter 34, as well as of chapters 53 to 69. The books also include English synopses and introductions. Volume 2b includes the Daksha myth (an important myth in Shiva mythology), the story of origin of Thaneswar, and detailed descriptions of hell. The third volume includes the entire myth cycle of Vindhyavāsinī, the Goddess who abides in the Vindhya mountain range, which served as the main material for my doctoral thesis.

■About Open Access

——In the 2019 academic year, the third volume of your book was made open access in this program. Data regarding subsequent downloads is available here.

	March-2020	April-2020	May-2020	June-2020	Total
BOOK	268	205	621	590	1,685
CHAPTER	84	18	18	13	133

Yokochi: There are quite a few. We printed only about two hundred copies of the first edition, so this is much more.

——Can you tell us why you wanted to make your book open access?

Yokochi: There’s a complicated story behind the original book’s publication. The original publisher was going out of business, so they sold all the rights to Brill. As for the third volume, the first printing sold out completely. Brill did not do a second printing and is only printing on-demand copies. Actually, a review was finally published in an international journal very recently. The reviewer said it was already only available on-demand when they ordered the book. On-demand printing is not very popular because the book itself and the text are smaller, and the paper quality is poor. This makes reading difficult. Now that the book’s open access, it’s very nice to be able to download and read a nice copy.

——So that’s how it happened.

Yokochi: The first edition is quite good quality, paper included, but the price is quite high.

——You said that only a limited number of first edition copies were printed. That was under the assumption that they would be placed in the libraries of major universities and research institutes doing classical literature, right?

Yokochi: Yes. Basically, things were based on the assumption that university libraries would buy the book. More than half of it is comprised of the Sanskrit text, so it’s not something that ordinary people will read. However, the problem with that arrangement in our field is that researchers in India can’t access the books. Even the libraries of Indian universities that deal with our field can’t buy them since it is too costly. That’s the biggest obstacle. In the case of monographs, it is quite common for a book to be reprinted by an Indian publisher at a lower price after publication in the West. When I was a student, I used to buy the Indian versions because they were much cheaper.

——You have already published several books in this Skandapurāṇa series, and I heard you have already received open access support from the Gonda Foundation.

Yokochi: The publications of this series are funded by the Gonda Foundation, and volume 4 and the most recent volume 5 were published as open access from the beginning. The Gonda Foundation was founded with the estate of Jan Gonda, a great scholar of Indian studies from Leiden University in the Netherlands. The foundation has launched two series, the Groningen Oriental Studies series and the Gonda Indological Studies series. The entirety of both series, including the previously published works, was sold to Brill.

——The first book in the Skandapurāṇa series came out in 1998. While you were collaborating with European researchers in the Netherlands and other countries, including putting together books for the series, were there efforts at an early stage to make the books open access?

Yokochi: In the case of this series, volume 4 has been open access since 2018.

——Was it made open access upon publication?

Yokochi: Yes. It was open access from the beginning. In the past few years, increasingly open access has been a requirement, especially in academic publishing funded by the ERC (European Research Council) and other European institutions. I think everyone has been going along with the idea that open access is good, that it enables a lot of people to download the books.

——Books are being made open access with funds from the ERC and other funding agencies, right?

Yokochi: Yes, I think so. Brill has always been very enthusiastic about making e-books. Starting with this fourth volume, partially because from the beginning Brill was the publisher, we negotiated with the Gonda Foundation, and an agreement was reached that it would be published open access.

■Open Science and the Broadening Field of Students

——When we interviewed you before about the dissemination of research, you mentioned that preserving texts is an important part of your philological research. You also said since it is necessary to properly create critical editions and preserve these texts, one foundation of open science must be making digital versions of the originals.

Yokochi: By originals, I probably meant manuscripts.

——So, the digitalization of manuscripts is a pre-existing trend, and, recently, on top of that, making critical editions open access has been going on in parallel. If you look at open access as part of this kind of trend, do you think it will expand the researcher community or the swath of students?

Yokochi: It depends on the book. This critical edition is a very specialized book, and students could not afford it, so making it open access was very useful for them. Even if the libraries have it, we’re only talking about the likes of Kyoto University, the University of Tokyo, and Osaka University. There is no way to get it at ordinary local universities, so open access, in this case, is very convenient for undergraduate students, graduate students, and young researchers. Also, in our field, we have gained a lot of recognition among Indian researchers. If something’s inaccessible, people don’t know it exists.

——You said it was reviewed in a journal, and that may have increased the readership to some extent. Looking at the download data, there was a considerable increase from April to May. Was it publicized around that time, for example?

Yokochi: That may have been due to my project colleague, Professor Peter Bisschop of Leiden University, announcing it on an international Indology mailing list. In addition to this, I was invited to appear on a South Asian Studies podcast, where Professor Bisschop and I talked about the latest fifth volume of the Skandapurāna series and the series itself. According to the host, the number of listeners is quite high, so download figures may have increased even more since then.

——That’s certainly a possibility. With regard to such opportunities leading to open access books being used as resources primarily by students and researchers – isn’t it possible that the number of researchers will thereby eventually increase?

Yokochi: I think that’s impossible because there are no posts worldwide. However, in China, while the number of universities where people can study Sanskrit is very limited, the number of students seems to be increasing. The number of people engaging in India-related research in China will increase in the future. We could also say that this is because there have been too few of them, and even those that did exist were mostly in Buddhist studies, so Indology researchers in other fields will increase there in the future. There is also a young researcher who is now teaching in Shanghai after earning their doctorate at Kyoto University. He specializes in Indian astronomy, though. He is probably the only expert on Indian astronomy in China.

■International Joint Research

——I’m sure it depends on the text and period in question, but which countries or regions are leading the Sanskrit research community now?

Yokochi: Basically from Europe, North America, and Japan. Nowadays, more and more researchers are from South Korea, Taiwan, and China. They work on Buddhism and so on. The same trend is found in Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries. However, the mainstream is still Europe, North America (including Canada), and Japan. Japanese researchers generally do solid research in any field.

——In Europe, is it the Netherlands and Germany with many Indology researchers?

Yokochi: It’s France, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The number of researchers in Italy is increasing especially rapidly. I think there have been many for a long time, but there is a lack of posts in Italy, and early career researchers, in particular, are going abroad. Scholars in Eastern Europe, especially Hungary and Poland, are also doing well. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a remarkable revival of Indology in Eastern Europe.

——So, everywhere the situation is tough, and the posts are limited, but there are also recovering areas. Is this due to the increasing mobility of researchers and research funds within the EU?

Yokochi: Yes. The latest trend in our field is to get a very large ERC project and do collaborative research. These projects have much more money and somewhat more members than Japan’s Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Kakenhi) projects.

——Are there an increasing number of opportunities for international collaborative research, for research with scholars from the places you mentioned earlier―South Korea, Taiwan, China, and so on?

Yokochi: International research in this field is increasing rapidly. In my case, I have been working mainly with researchers in the Netherlands. I am funded by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, and they have been funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Another project I’m part of is an ERC one led by researchers at University of Naples “L’Orientale.” Part of the project involves producing a critical edition of a text corpus chapter by chapter. In addition to European and Indian researchers, Japanese researchers are also participating in this project. Those are my two main international collaborative research projects.

——So, compared to the situation in Europe, there are not many funds in Japan that encourage international collaborative research in a way like ERC?

Yokochi: Although there are international joint research projects funded by JSPS Grants-in-Aid, it’s my impression that they are premised on collaboration between research institutes and the like. When it comes to humanities, one often does joint research based on personal connections―one person at this university, one person here – so I felt it would be difficult to apply.

——That’s probably right. In general terms, you also had said that if you can secure stable research funding for a certain amount of money and period of time, resources will come to you and you’ll become a center of research. If so, do Japan’s research funds, which last for some years but are still relatively temporally limited, present difficulties?

Yokochi: At the moment, at best one can get four or five years of Kakenhi funding. But it is the same in the Netherlands and elsewhere. For example, in the Skandapurāṇa Project, I can’t say that I’ll take twenty years and do everything. NWO is also four years. There are a few exceptions, such as a project related to Buddhism in Gandhara, funded by a ten-year grant, but those are just exceptions. Rather than the duration of the research, I think funding sources should have designs that include more flexible forms of international collaboration that are in line with how it takes place in the humanities. For example, individuals from multiple countries engaging in research activities together.

■Digital Humanities

——One more tendency in funding might be increased interest in the digital humanities as part of the open science trend. What do you think is the case for your research field?

Yokochi: In terms of recent developments, I think the cutting-edge of digital humanities is creating systems in which critical editions are not published but put online in a searchable format with lots of links to commentaries and translations. However, since different researchers have different skills, it would be good if seminars for beginners taught them the benefits and what inputs produce what outputs. There are people in Indology who are knowledgeable about such information systems, but I usually can’t follow what they say without having the terminology explained to me.

You’re saying it’s necessary to teach humanities researchers that kind of literacy, or should I say the basics of digital humanities.

Yokochi: Yes. Since everyone is busy, it would be good to have it online or in some other form that makes it easier to participate. Because each field has specific characteristics, I do not know how general it can be. We will probably be talking more and more about creating websites for Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research projects as well, and it will be necessary to have one person who is technically knowledgeable to upload created texts. Editorial work would be easier if such a program were created from the beginning stages of the project, and the text published on a website for everyone to use, instead of being published in a book. That will become mainstream in the future.

——So, making it open from the beginning.

Yokochi: Indology may not have done this yet, but studies in the West of, for example, old manuscripts of the Bible, already have. You can click text to jump to that part of the manuscript, or to a specific part of the manuscript. However, the issue is how to evaluate such work as career accomplishments when hiring people and so on.

——If researchers acquire such technical backgrounds as well, it certainly might lead to a certain degree of division of labor. Technical support might be seen as part of the research process. Yokochi: Such technical support will become very necessary in the future. Whether it will be recognized as a career achievement is certainly important. People who are strong in information fields are all asked to help out with projects, but they also want to publish books or make achievements in their own research. Right now, it is difficult for such work to be recognized in hiring and other situations.

　In the future, there will probably be a need to on websites skillfully bring together critical editions and manuscripts in the case of philology, or, for example, photos taken in the field for anthropology research.

——There are many databases, but not many that are digital humanities platforms usable in research. In the kind of cases you just mentioned, it would be good if, rather than a researcher, there were a specialized company familiar with such work, like a web developer.

Yokochi: Right, it would be good to have someone to serve as an interface. To whom we could say, “I would like this to be this in a way that is tailored to my field.” We don’t know the basics – what to ask for, how to ask for it, or what people might come back with if we ask them. Even if the actual work can be outsourced, it is still necessary to have enough knowledge to be able to understand and properly communicate what you want in terms of format and the like―to be able to say, “I want you to apply this technology in this way for research purposes.” In philology, it is very important to be able to search the text. While the Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō (a Buddhist canon) and so on are being made into databases by academic societies, generally in our field, each person releases their own e-text and adds a link to Göttingen’s GRETIL, or people simply exchange links with each other. Such “grep-able e-texts” that can be searched like that are very important.

——Thank you for sharing your thoughts on a wide range of subjects, from open access books to the cutting edge of the digital humanities.

Interview Date: 13 December 2021

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