JUSTICE (the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources) is Japan’s national library consortium for negotiating access to, and increasingly open-access publishing terms for, scholarly e-resources on behalf of Japanese universities. It plays the same structural role in Japan that Projekt DEAL plays in Germany, Couperin plays in France, or Jisc plays in the UK: a single collective negotiating body standing between hundreds of individual university libraries and a small number of large academic publishers, rather than each institution negotiating a subscription or open-access deal on its own. This guide covers what JUSTICE is, how its Read & Publish negotiations work, what participation actually commits (and doesn’t commit) an individual Japanese university to, and how the model compares to national consortia CASRAI has already covered elsewhere.
What JUSTICE Is
JUSTICE was formed on 1 April 2011 through an alliance between the Japan Association of National University Libraries (JANUL) and the Public and Private University Libraries Consortium (PULC), operating in coordination with Japan’s National Institute of Informatics (NII). NII continues to host JUSTICE’s secretariat and publishes the consortium’s official information in English and Japanese at contents.nii.ac.jp/en/justice. Per NII’s own description, JUSTICE exists to “promote activities for providing stably and continuously academic information, including e-journals, essential for education and research activities” at Japanese universities — covering contracting, managing, providing, and preserving e-resources, and training library staff to support that work.
JUSTICE describes itself as Japan’s largest library-consortium organization, with more than 500 participating member libraries drawn from national, public, and private universities and research institutions, per NII’s current listing. Like most national consortia in this space, JUSTICE is not a government agency and does not itself publish research, fund research, or set open-access policy nationally — it is a collective-bargaining and shared-infrastructure body that member libraries voluntarily join and fund.
How JUSTICE Negotiates: Read & Publish Agreements
JUSTICE’s core function is negotiating licensing terms with major academic publishers on behalf of its member libraries collectively, rather than each Japanese university bargaining bilaterally with each publisher. In recent years this has shifted from subscription-only negotiation toward Read-and-Publish and other transformative agreements that bundle reading (subscription) access with reduced- or no-additional-cost open-access publishing for eligible corresponding authors at participating institutions — the same negotiating mechanism used by Jisc, Projekt DEAL, Couperin, and comparable bodies. JUSTICE has published its own negotiation policy and an OA2020-aligned roadmap setting out its position on transitioning from subscription-based to open-access-based publishing economics, and its news pages document a running record of proposals and agreements reached with individual publishers, including Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Cambridge University Press, and Company of Biologists, among others.
Structurally, JUSTICE is an opt-in consortium: a Read & Publish agreement JUSTICE negotiates with a given publisher sets the framework terms, but individual member libraries then separately decide whether to sign on to that specific agreement for their own institution and budget — a library can choose to remain on a subscription-only basis, decline a publisher’s terms altogether, or opt in only to some of the agreements JUSTICE has negotiated. This mirrors the opt-in structure CASRAI has documented in the UK (Jisc) and the Netherlands (UKB): a national or sector-wide negotiation reduces duplicated bargaining effort and increases collective leverage, but it does not by itself guarantee that every member institution actually participates in every resulting deal.
What Participation Actually Means for a Researcher
For a researcher at a Japanese university, whether a given journal is open access to them at no additional author-facing cost depends on two separate facts, not one: whether JUSTICE has negotiated a Read & Publish or similar agreement with that journal’s publisher, and whether the researcher’s own institution has actually opted in to that specific agreement. The first fact is a matter of public record on JUSTICE’s own news pages; the second is institution-specific and is usually confirmed through the university’s own library or research-support office, not assumed from the existence of a national-level agreement. A research administrator fielding “is this open access for me?” from a faculty member should check both, not just the first.
Because publisher lists, agreement terms, and which institutions have opted in to a given deal all change with each negotiation cycle, this guide deliberately does not restate specific discount percentages, article-processing-charge caps, or per-institution participation counts as fixed facts. Those figures are cycle-specific and are best confirmed directly against JUSTICE’s own current agreement listings at contents.nii.ac.jp/en/justice, or a given institution’s own library open-access guidance, rather than treated as static.
How Japan’s Model Compares to Other National Consortia
JUSTICE sits alongside a small set of other national or regional bodies performing broadly the same collective-negotiation function, each with its own governance structure and negotiating history, several of which CASRAI has covered separately:
- UK — Jisc: the UK’s sector-wide digital-infrastructure body, whose Next Generation Open Access programme negotiates national Read-and-Publish frameworks that individual UK universities then separately opt into.
- Germany — Projekt DEAL: negotiates nationwide Publish-and-Read agreements on behalf of German research and academic institutions, with a longer and more contentious negotiating history including a multi-year standoff with Elsevier.
- France — Couperin: the French university library consortium negotiating national open-access and subscription deals for French higher education and research institutions.
- Finland — FinELib: Finland’s national consortium negotiating open-access publishing agreements on behalf of Finnish universities, research institutes, and public libraries.
- Netherlands — UKB: the Dutch university library association whose negotiation programme is structurally similar to JUSTICE’s opt-in model.
- India — One Nation One Subscription (ONOS): a centrally government-funded national reading-access scheme, structurally different from JUSTICE in that it is a government-run subscription programme rather than a library-consortium-negotiated, institution-by-institution opt-in framework.
What distinguishes JUSTICE from most of these peers is less its negotiating mechanics — collective bargaining, Read-and-Publish structures, and an opt-in sign-on model are common across all of them — than its founding structure: JUSTICE was created specifically through the 2011 merger of two pre-existing library groupings (JANUL and PULC) that had previously run separate, smaller-scale negotiations, consolidating national- and private-sector university libraries into a single negotiating body under NII coordination, rather than being built from the outset as a single unified consortium the way some of its European counterparts were.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does JUSTICE stand for?
Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources. It is sometimes referred to in English-language coverage simply as “Japan’s university library consortium.”
Is JUSTICE a government agency?
No. JUSTICE is a voluntary consortium of member university libraries, coordinated through Japan’s National Institute of Informatics (NII), which hosts its secretariat. It negotiates licensing and open-access terms on behalf of its members; it does not set national open-access policy, fund research, or publish research itself.
Which publishers have Read & Publish agreements with JUSTICE?
JUSTICE’s news pages document proposed and concluded Read & Publish or transformative agreements with several major academic publishers, including Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Cambridge University Press, and Company of Biologists. Because the list, terms, and participating institutions change with each negotiation cycle, confirm the current status directly on JUSTICE’s own agreement listings rather than treating any fixed list as permanent.
Does a JUSTICE-negotiated agreement automatically apply to my university?
No. JUSTICE negotiates the framework terms; each member library then separately decides whether to opt in to a specific publisher agreement for its own institution and budget. Confirm your own institution’s actual participation through its library or research-support office rather than assuming from the existence of a national-level JUSTICE agreement.
How is JUSTICE different from Jisc, Projekt DEAL, or Couperin?
All four perform the same core function — collective negotiation of open-access and subscription terms on behalf of a country’s universities — but each has a distinct governance history and institutional scope. JUSTICE is unusual among this group in having been formed by the 2011 merger of two previously separate Japanese library groupings (JANUL and PULC) under NII coordination, rather than being built as a single body from the outset.
Key Takeaways
- JUSTICE (Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources) is Japan’s national library consortium, formed in April 2011 from an alliance between JANUL and PULC and coordinated through Japan’s National Institute of Informatics (NII).
- It is Japan’s largest library-consortium organization, with more than 500 participating member libraries, per NII’s current listing.
- JUSTICE negotiates Read & Publish and other transformative agreements with major academic publishers, including Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Cambridge University Press, and Company of Biologists.
- Participation is opt-in at the individual member-library level — a national JUSTICE agreement with a publisher does not automatically mean every member institution has signed on to it.
- JUSTICE performs the same collective-negotiation role as Jisc (UK), Projekt DEAL (Germany), Couperin (France), FinELib (Finland), and UKB (Netherlands), each covered separately by CASRAI, with India’s ONOS offering a structurally different, government-run alternative model.
