How to Become Spiritually Western as a Japanese Researcher: DEV and Academia.edu as Underground Academia, Horizon Europe as Orthodoxy

TL;DR

• On 30 July 2026, Japan officially became an associated country to Horizon Europe, the EU's €93.5B research programme. This is the orthodoxy: institutional, peer-reviewed and well funded.
• Platforms like DEV Community and Academia.edu are the underground: open, informal, and free of gatekeepers.
• Japanese researchers tend to overlook these platforms. Paradoxically, that is exactly why they can become a home.
• Being "spiritually Western" means moving between both worlds. I use CV HAL and Zenodo to bridge them.

What I mean by "spiritually Western"

I don't mean copying Western culture or dropping your Japanese identity.

I mean adopting a few habits that the European research world takes for granted:

• Publish early and in the open, before the work feels "perfect"
• Own your identity as a researcher, not only through your institution's name
• Reach across borders without waiting for an introduction
• Treat your outputs as public assets: papers, code and data alike

Many of us in Japan were trained to work through official channels and speak only when the work is finished. That is a real strength. It also makes us nearly invisible on the global stage.

The orthodoxy: Horizon Europe

Japan is now the 23rd associated country to Horizon Europe and, with about 123 million people, the most populous one.

Date	Milestone
22 Dec 2025	European Commission and the Government of Japan conclude negotiations
Jan 2026	Transitional arrangements let Japanese entities apply to Pillar II calls
30 Jul 2026	Association agreement enters into force

The association covers Pillar II: Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness, worth €52.4B. Japanese organisations can now coordinate projects and receive EU funding directly, on equal terms with EU member states. Before, we mostly joined as a "third country" and paid our own way.

But orthodoxy comes with rules. Open science is a contractual obligation under Article 17 of the Model Grant Agreement:

• Immediate open access: no embargo, and the paper must be deposited in a trusted repository by publication.
• Licences and metadata: publications under CC BY (or equivalent), with metadata open under CC0 and FAIR.
• Research data: "as open as possible, as closed as necessary", following your Data Management Plan (DMP).

In other words, the orthodoxy itself demands openness. The Western mindset is written into the contract.

The underground: DEV and Academia.edu

DEV Community is a developer platform where anyone can publish technical writing. There is no peer review and no institutional gate. Ideas, tools and half-finished experiments get shared and discussed in public.

Academia.edu is a commercial platform where researchers share papers and drafts and follow each other's work. It works more like a social network than an archive.

Neither is "proper" academia. That is the point. They are where people outside, or alongside, the institutions think out loud.

The paradox: overlooked places can become your home

Japanese researchers and engineers rarely treat these platforms as serious venues. Developers often write on Japanese-language platforms instead. Academics tend to see anything outside journals and conferences as a distraction.

That neglect creates an opening:

• Less competition for attention: a thoughtful Japanese voice in English stands out, because there are few of them
• No gatekeepers: early-career researchers, independent researchers and engineers between industry and academia can be heard without permission
• A rehearsal space: you can practise writing in English, explaining your work, and taking public feedback before entering the orthodox arena
• A network that finds you: European collaborators looking for Japanese partners may find your posts before your institutional page

The places we undervalue can become the places where we actually belong.

But the underground isn't enough on its own

Be honest about the limits:

• DEV posts are not peer-reviewed publications
• Academia.edu is a commercial platform, not a trusted repository, and does not satisfy Horizon Europe's open-access requirements
• Neither guarantees long-term preservation or a persistent identifier

So the underground is where you build your voice. It is not where you file your obligations.

The bridge: CV HAL and Zenodo

According to OpenAIRE, only five trusted repositories are currently fully ready for Horizon Europe compliance. HAL and Zenodo are two of them. They connect the underground to the orthodoxy.

CV HAL: a legitimate identity

HAL is a French open archive. With an IdHAL (a persistent author ID) and a CV HAL (a public, auto-updating publication page), you get a profile that the orthodox world recognises.

• Merge variants of your name (e.g. "Taro Yamada" and "T. Yamada")
• Collect all your work as author or co-author in one place
• Link your ORCID, IdRef, arXiv and ResearcherID
• Add your blog and social profiles, so your underground presence connects to your official one

Setup:

1. Create a HAL account and deposit at least one item
2. Go to "Mon espace > Mon profil" and create your IdHAL (default format: firstname-lastname)
3. Link your ORCID and attach all your name variants
4. Create and publish your CV HAL

Note: your IdHAL can't be changed once set. It also becomes your CV URL, cv.archives-ouvertes.fr/<your-idhal>.

Zenodo: giving underground work a DOI

Zenodo is a general-purpose repository built by CERN and OpenAIRE and funded by the EU for over a decade. Its EU Open Research Repository runs automated checks for Horizon Europe compliance and already holds more than 128,000 EU-funded outputs.

For developers and independent researchers, Zenodo is where informal work becomes citable:

• GitHub integration: every GitHub Release gets archived with its own DOI
• Versioning: a Concept DOI for all versions, plus one per version
• Any output type: preprints, datasets, software, slides and reports can all receive a DOI
• Funding metadata: tag deposits with your Horizon Europe project for reporting

Use CC0 or CC BY for data, as OpenAIRE recommends.

My workflow: living in both worlds

1. Think in the underground. Write ideas, experiments and tool write-ups on DEV. Share drafts on Academia.edu to find readers.
2. Archive what matters. When a piece becomes solid, deposit it in Zenodo for a DOI. Release code through GitHub and Zenodo.
3. Publish in the orthodoxy. Submit to journals, and deposit the accepted manuscript in HAL on publication (CC BY).
4. Connect everything. Use ORCID as the hub, link it to IdHAL and Zenodo, and list your DEV and Academia.edu profiles in your CV HAL.
5. Reach out. When contacting European partners, send your CV HAL. Let your underground writing show how you think.

Pre-flight checklist

• ORCID created, with up-to-date affiliation and works
• IdHAL created and CV HAL published
• DEV and Academia.edu profiles linked from CV HAL
• Zenodo connected to GitHub
• LICENSE and CITATION.cff added to key repos
• A Data Management Plan (DMP) template ready
• Contacted my institution's research support office about Horizon Europe calls

Wrapping up

Horizon Europe is the orthodoxy, and Japan finally has a seat at the table. But a seat isn't a voice.

The voice gets built in the underground, on platforms most of us ignore. Being "spiritually Western" isn't about leaving Japan behind. It's about being open by default, owning your work, and moving freely between the margins and the centre.

The places we overlook may be exactly where we belong.