COVENTRY, ENGLAND—Western scientists need to do more to obtain and make use of Japanese technical research results if their countries hope to remain competitive in many emerging areas.
American and European scientists, administrators and industry representatives heard that message repeatedly from speakers at the International Conference on Japanese Information, held here last. month at the University of Warwick. They were also told that scientists should not expect any extraordinary effort by the Japanese.
“We can bang the table demanding things from Japan,” said Richard Samuels of MIT. “But this has to be seen as an American, not a Japanese, problem.”
In many fields, Japanese scientists lack incentives to make their material more widely known. “Who are the peers for whom Japanese researchers are writing?” asked I. BOtskor of the Japan-Info project, a European Economic Community program to create a Western data base of unpublished Japanese literature. The NSF’s Charles T. ...
