The academic publishing industry is witnessing major disruption. The spread of the Internet since the ’90s has upset the traditional academic publishing framework. It has expanded the possibilities for open science but also created numerous flashpoints between the commercial publishing industry and academia.

Against this background, the University of Tsukuba has emerged as the first Japanese university to make some headway in the publishing world. The Open Research Publishing Gateway, released by the university in collaboration with F1000Research in January 2021, is the latest initiative by universities aimed at providing an alternative to traditional publishing.

The initiative has made its way into the sphere of multilingual publishing of humanities and sociology research—a common issue for non-English speaking research institutes who have been using the new publishing platforms available in Europe and the United States.

But how can humanities research published in Japanese be evaluated with the same yardstick as English research in an era of science- and English-oriented academics? How can we put the control back into the researchers’ hands? Researchers from the humanities and sociology department of the University of Tsukuba and University Research Administrators (URA) are playing a key role in finding a solution to this unique problem.