ReaD Overview
Outline
Directory Database of Research and Development Activities (ReaD) is a website which was launched on August 1st, 1998 to extensively collect and provide information on research institutes, researchers, research subjects, and research resources of Japanese universities and public research institutions, aimed at industry-university-government cooperation, active use of research results, and promotion of research and development activities. From Fiscal Year 2002, ReaD took over the duties of “Survey for Creating a Database of Research Activities in Universities, etc.” and “Survey on Academic Research Activities,” which had been implemented by the National Institute of Informatics of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).
On January 15th, 2007, the ReaD system was renewed to reflect the opinions of the researchers and users, aimed at enhancement of the convenience of information registration and search functions and improvement in exhausitivity and rapid provision of information. Furthermore, the additional functions “link function to literature information,” “function of feed-backing the number of accesses to researchers,” “function of transmitting an inquiry email to the researcher” were released. For more information about the major improvements to the system, please click here.
ReaD has the following four directories: “Research Institutes,” “Researchers,” “Research Subjects,” “Research Resources.” Anyone can access to the registered information of each directory on the ReaD website. The numbers of times the information was accessed on the English website exceeded 916 thousand in Fiscal Year 2007. In particular, public release of researcher information including the latest research results and subjects has been promoting industry-university-government cooperation, people exchanges, and joint researches. For more information on “Examples of ReaD being Useful,” please click here.
Registered Information
ReaD consists of four kinds of information as follows.
| Information | Items | Number of Information |
|---|---|---|
| Research Institute | Name, Address, History, Research Field, Main Activities, etc. | About 2,200 institutes |
| Researcher | Name, Affiliation, Job Title, Research Field, Research Theme, Research Result, etc. | About 200,000 researchers |
| Research Subject | Name, Project Leader, Outline of Research, Research Field, Research Result, etc. | About 58,000 subjects |
| Research Resource(*) | Name, Contact Address, Outline of Resource, Usage Environment, etc. | About 3,600 resources |
(*)“Research Resource” should be tangible and intangible resources which are owned by research institutions, are expected to support research activities either directly or indirectly, and available for outside researchers.
For equipment which can be reused, please select “Reusable equipment” among the research resource types.
In principle, the information in ReaD is registered or updated by researcher himself (or institution administrator himself). Please click here for further details.
ReaD User Questionnaire
According to the ReaD User Questionnaire (No. of respondents: 1,067) implemented in FY2008, about 90% of the respondents replied “ReaD is useful / will be useful.”
The use purposes of ReaD in descending order were “checking researchers’ profiles, research histories, etc.,” “checking partners for joint research and funded research,” “using ReaD for preliminary surveys before starting a new research project,” and “recruitment / job hunting.”
Types of organizations to which users belong are academic institutions including universities (62%), public institutions (13%), companies (12%), and others.
Record of Providing ReaD Information
Information registered with ReaD is effectively used in the government’s study for drafting of academic and scientific policy and for statistical purposes as shown below.
| Institute Using the Information | Purpose | Information Used |
|---|---|---|
| Cabinet Office | 1. Study for proceeding with the 3rd Basic Program for Science and Technology 2. Bottleneck investigation for promoting science and technology policy 3. Output-side studies for innovation policy (All subcontracted to Mizuho Information & Research Institute, Inc. by the Cabinet Office) |
Researcher |
| Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology National Institute of Science and Technology Policy |
Used as data in statistical analysis in research on science and technology personnel, etc. | Researcher |
| National Institute of Informatics | Used as data in statistical analysis in research for understanding trends in academic research activities | Researcher, Research Institute, Research Subject, Research Resource |
| Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research | Used as data in statistical analysis for the research study on the “Quantitative Analysis of Knowledge Generation & Transfer and Organizational Ability: Development of Technological Innovation” | Researcher, Research Institute |
| Health and Labour Sciences Research Grants | Selection of questionnaire respondents for the research involving the “Mental Health Science Research Project” | Researcher |
| Osaka Prefectural Institute for Advanced Industry Development | Selection of institutions surveyed in the “Survey on External Cooperation in Research and Development” | Research Institute |
