DEV Community: 根本卓哉　Takuya Nemoto

Still an English Developing Country: Japan's English Problem, Its Real Limits, and the Isolation of Japanese Engineers

根本卓哉　Takuya Nemoto — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:12:15 +0000

TL;DR

In the EF English Proficiency Index 2025, Japan ranked 96th out of 123 countries, in the lowest "very low proficiency" band.
Japan's weakest skills are writing and speaking, the exact skills engineers need to take part in global communities.
In Japan, simply "being able to speak English" is still a status symbol. That alone says we are an English developing country.
The result is isolation. Japanese engineers build great things, then stay invisible in the global conversation.

The numbers

The EF English Proficiency Index (EF EPI) 2025 is based on 2.2 million adult test takers across 123 countries and regions.

Metric	Japan	Note
Global rank	96th of 123	"Very low proficiency" band
Overall score	446	Global average: 488
Reading	454	Strongest skill
Listening	437
Writing	394
Speaking	393	Weakest skill

Japan's rank has fallen for many years in a row. In the first edition in 2011, Japan placed 14th, though only 40 countries were included then.

A fair caveat: EF EPI uses a free online test, so the sample is self-selected. It isn't a perfect national measure. But the overall pattern matches what most of us experience every day.

English as a status symbol

In a country with high English proficiency, saying "I speak English" is like saying "I can drive." It's a basic skill, not an identity.

In Japan, it's different:

Job listings highlight "English required" as if it were a rare specialty
TOEIC scores appear on résumés and business cards
Colleagues who can handle an English email become the team's unofficial "English person"
Speaking English in a meeting can feel like showing off

When a basic communication skill becomes a status symbol, it means most people don't have it. That is what I mean by an English developing country. Not a developing economy, but a developing society when it comes to the world's shared working language.

Where the limits really are

It's easy to blame individuals. But the limits are largely structural:

Linguistic distance: Japanese and English differ in word order, sounds, writing system and the way ideas are structured. The gap is genuinely large.
Exam-oriented education: for decades, school English has focused on grammar and reading for entrance exams, not on writing and speaking.
Few chances to use it: most Japanese people can live, work and study entirely in Japanese. Without real need, skills fade.
Fear of mistakes: a culture that values getting things right makes people stay silent rather than speak imperfectly.

The EF scores reflect this precisely. Reading is our strongest skill; writing and speaking are our weakest. We were trained to receive English, not to produce it.

How this isolates Japanese engineers

Global engineering communities run on written English: GitHub issues, pull request reviews, RFCs, Discord and Slack channels, mailing lists, conference talks and blog posts.

These are productive skills, exactly where Japan is weakest. So a familiar pattern appears:

Japanese engineers read English documentation fine, but rarely open issues or comment on PRs
Great technical articles get written in Japanese, on Japanese platforms, and never reach the global audience
Bugs found in Japan get worked around locally instead of being reported upstream
Japanese voices are thin at global conferences and in open-source governance
Knowledge flows into Japan, but much less flows back out

The result is a one-way relationship. We consume the global ecosystem, but we're barely part of it. Not because our engineering is weaker, but because our voice doesn't travel.

Why this matters now

Two changes make this urgent:

Japan joined Horizon Europe in July 2026. Japanese organisations can now lead EU-funded projects, but leading means writing proposals, running meetings and negotiating in English.
AI tools are developed and discussed mainly in English. Communities around them move fast, and the conversation happens in English first.

Staying silent used to cost us visibility. Now it costs us opportunities.

Breaking out of isolation

You don't need perfect English. Global engineering communities are full of non-native speakers, and "good enough English" is the norm. Clarity matters far more than elegance.

Write first, speak later. Start with written English: issues, comments, short posts. It's slower and safer than speaking.
Use AI translation and grammar tools without shame. They're a bridge, not a cheat. Check the output, then post it.
Open one issue this month. Report a bug or ask a question on a project you use.
Publish one article in English. Translate your best Japanese post and put it on DEV.
Join one global community channel and read for a week. Then say hello.
Accept imperfection. A post with small grammar mistakes helps more people than a perfect post that's never written.

Wrapping up

Japan's English problem isn't a secret, and it isn't only about individual effort. It's built into our education, our language and our comfort.

But the real cost isn't a low ranking. It's isolation: brilliant Japanese engineers working in a bubble while the global conversation moves on without them.

As long as English remains a status symbol in Japan, we'll stay an English developing country. The way out is to treat English as a tool, use it imperfectly, and start talking.

The Quiet Boycott of edX and Coursera: How Japan's Contrarian Love of Reading in Japanese Spreads Anti-Intellectualism

根本卓哉　Takuya Nemoto — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 23:57:31 +0000

TL;DR

Many Japanese learners quietly avoid global online courses like edX and Coursera. It isn't an organised boycott, but it works like one.
The usual excuse is "I'd rather read a good book." Reading in Japanese is treated as the serious, intellectual choice.
I think this is a contrarian pose. It looks like intellectualism, but it often protects us from the discomfort of learning in English, in public, alongside the rest of the world.
The irony: Japanese learners who do take these courses perform extremely well. The problem isn't ability. It's attitude.

The quiet boycott

Nobody in Japan declares a boycott of edX or Coursera. There are no campaigns and no manifestos.

Instead there is a mood. Online courses are seen as something for job-hoppers, for people chasing certificates, or for "Americans who like shortcuts." Serious people, the thinking goes, study properly: through university, through books, through their company's training.

So the courses go unopened. Lectures from the world's top universities, often free to audit, sit one click away while we wait for someone to translate the textbook.

Reading in Japanese as a contrarian badge

Japan has one of the richest translation cultures in the world. Since the Meiji era, we have absorbed Western knowledge by translating it. Almost any important book eventually appears in Japanese, often in excellent translation. That is a genuine achievement.

But it has a side effect. Reading in Japanese has become a kind of badge:

"I don't need online courses. I read books."
"Video lectures are shallow. Real understanding comes from reading."
"I'll wait for the Japanese edition."

Each statement sounds intellectual. Together, they form a contrarian stance against the way the rest of the world now learns.

Why I call it anti-intellectualism

Anti-intellectualism doesn't always look like hostility toward knowledge. Sometimes it looks like loving knowledge, but only in a form that never challenges you.

The Japanese-only reading habit has three problems:

Time lag: by the time a book is translated, the field has often moved on. In fast-changing areas like AI, data science and software, the gap can make the knowledge outdated on arrival.
Filtered knowledge: what gets translated is decided by publishers and their sense of what will sell. You see the world through someone else's selection.
No conversation: a book is a monologue. A course has assignments, peer review, forums and deadlines. You are tested, corrected and exposed to how others think.

Avoiding that exposure while calling it "deep reading" is the contrarian move. It turns comfort into a virtue.

The irony: we're good at this

Here is what makes the boycott so frustrating. In Coursera's 2024 Global Skills Report, Japan rose to 2nd place in the global skills ranking, and Japanese learners were the most proficient in Asia-Pacific.

When Japanese learners show up, they do brilliantly. The barrier isn't intelligence or diligence. It's the decision not to show up.

What we lose

Avoiding global online learning costs more than knowledge:

Shared language: global collaborators learn from the same courses, frameworks and lecturers. Skipping them means missing the common vocabulary.
English practice: courses offer academic English at a manageable pace, with subtitles and transcripts.
Visibility: certificates and completed projects are public signals. They tell the world you are part of the conversation.
Readiness: now that Japan has joined Horizon Europe, Japanese researchers can lead EU-funded projects. Leading requires speaking the same intellectual language as European partners, in real time.

How to break the boycott

You don't have to give up books. You have to stop using them as a shield.

Pick one course that matches a book you were "waiting for" in translation. Audit it for free.
Turn on English subtitles, not Japanese ones. Use the transcript to read along.
Do the assignments, especially the peer-reviewed ones. That's where the learning happens.
Post what you learn. Write a summary on DEV or share notes on Academia.edu, in English.
Archive anything substantial, like code or a project report, on Zenodo for a DOI, and link it from your CV HAL.
Then read the book, in whichever language you like. You'll read it differently.

Wrapping up

Japan's translation culture made us one of the most learned societies in the world. But a strength becomes a weakness when it turns into an excuse.

The quiet boycott of edX and Coursera isn't about quality or depth. It's about comfort. Reading only in Japanese lets us feel intellectual without being challenged.

The world's classrooms are open, and Japanese learners already prove they can excel in them. All we have to do is walk in.

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

根本卓哉　Takuya Nemoto — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 23:17:16 +0000

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:

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

Think in the underground. Write ideas, experiments and tool write-ups on DEV. Share drafts on Academia.edu to find readers.
Archive what matters. When a piece becomes solid, deposit it in Zenodo for a DOI. Release code through GitHub and Zenodo.
Publish in the orthodoxy. Submit to journals, and deposit the accepted manuscript in HAL on publication (CC BY).
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.
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.

Japan Just Joined Horizon Europe — Here's How I'm Getting Open-Science Ready with CV HAL and Zenodo

根本卓哉　Takuya Nemoto — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 23:01:57 +0000

TL;DR

On 30 July 2026, Japan officially became an associated country to Horizon Europe, the EU's €93.5B research and innovation programme.
Japanese universities, labs and companies can now lead consortia and receive EU funding directly under Pillar II (€52.4B).
Horizon Europe comes with mandatory open-science rules. I use CV HAL and Zenodo, two of only five repositories rated fully "compliance-ready", to stay prepared.

What happened?

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, the largest part of the programme. It funds multinational projects in health, digital, climate, energy, mobility, food and the bioeconomy.

What actually changes?

Before, Japan mostly took part as a "third country". You could join a consortium, but you usually had to bring your own money.

Now Japanese organisations participate on equal terms with EU member states. That means you can:

Coordinate a Horizon Europe project, not just join one
Receive EU funding directly
Keep accessing the parts already open to third countries (Excellent Science, Innovative Europe, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions)

In return, Japan makes a financial contribution to the programme. In short, we've gone from "please let us in" to "let's build the team ourselves."

The catch: open science is mandatory

In Horizon Europe, open science isn't a nice-to-have. It's a contractual obligation under Article 17 of the Model Grant Agreement. The key requirements:

Immediate open access: peer-reviewed publications must be open with no embargo. At the latest on publication, deposit the published version or accepted manuscript in a trusted repository.
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", deposited in a trusted repository by the deadlines in your Data Management Plan (DMP).

So which repository? According to OpenAIRE, only five trusted repositories are currently fully ready for Horizon Europe compliance, and HAL and Zenodo are two of them. That's exactly why I use both.

CV HAL: your researcher business card

HAL is a French open archive. On top of it you can create an IdHAL (a persistent author ID) and a CV HAL (a public, auto-updating publication page). When European partners are scouting collaborators, a clean public profile does a lot of work for you.

With IdHAL you can:

Merge variants of your name (e.g. "Taro Yamada" and "T. Yamada") and pick a default
Collect all your work as author or co-author in one place
Generate a CV whose bibliography updates automatically

You can link your ORCID, plus IDs like IdRef, arXiv and ResearcherID, and add your blog or social profiles. Your CV lives at cv.archives-ouvertes.fr/<your-idhal>.

Setup:

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

Note: your IdHAL can't be changed once set. It also becomes your CV URL, so pick a clean, romanised form.

Zenodo: DOIs for papers, data and code

Zenodo is a general-purpose repository built by CERN and OpenAIRE, funded by the EU for over a decade. It hosts the EU Open Research Repository, which runs automated checks to help you meet Horizon Europe requirements. It already holds more than 128,000 EU-funded outputs.

OpenAIRE's advice: when in doubt, deposit in Zenodo's EU Open Research Repository, and in a subject or institutional repository for visibility. That's my HAL + Zenodo combo.

Why devs will like it:

GitHub integration: connect a repo, and every GitHub Release gets archived with its own DOI
Versioning: a Concept DOI for all versions, plus a DOI per version
Funding metadata: tag deposits with your Horizon Europe project, which makes reporting much easier

For data licences, stick with CC0 or CC BY, as OpenAIRE recommends.

My workflow

Papers go to HAL for credibility and visibility. Code and data go to Zenodo for DOIs and versioning.

Use ORCID as the hub and link it to both IdHAL and Zenodo
When a paper is accepted, deposit the accepted manuscript in HAL on publication (CC BY)
Keep code on GitHub and cut a Release to mint a Zenodo DOI
Cite the Zenodo DOIs in the paper's Data/Code Availability statement
Share my CV HAL link when reaching out to potential European partners

Pre-flight checklist

ORCID created, with up-to-date affiliation and works
IdHAL created and CV HAL published
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

Japan's association opens the door to leading projects in a €52.4B funding pillar. The open-science requirements at the entrance are easy to meet if HAL and Zenodo are already part of your routine. Set them up now so you're not scrambling when the next call opens.

Why I Prefer Zenodo Over arXiv: Building My Research Infrastructure with HAL and ORCID for a Future in Horizon Europe

根本卓哉　Takuya Nemoto — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 10:02:44 +0000

When people think about preprints, arXiv is often the first platform that comes to mind.

It is understandable. arXiv is one of the most influential repositories in modern academic publishing, particularly in computer science, mathematics, physics, and related fields.

But my own research strategy has led me in a somewhat different direction.

I increasingly use Zenodo as the central repository for my research outputs, while building a broader research identity around HAL and ORCID.

This is not because I consider arXiv inferior.

It is because I am trying to solve a different problem.

I am not only asking:

“Where can I upload my paper?”

I am asking:

“How do I build a durable, internationally visible research infrastructure around my work?”

That distinction matters.

Zenodo is more than a preprint server

For my purposes, Zenodo is particularly attractive because it allows me to treat research outputs as persistent research assets rather than merely manuscripts awaiting publication.

A research project can contain much more than a PDF.

There may be:

papers
datasets
source code
computational models
supplementary materials
presentations
documentation
revised versions
experimental artifacts

Zenodo provides a way to bring these components into a persistent, DOI-based research environment.

The DOI is particularly important.

A repository URL can change.

A social-media post can disappear.

A personal website can be redesigned.

A cloud-storage link can break.

But a DOI is designed to function as a persistent scholarly identifier.

For an independent researcher trying to build an international research presence, that distinction is significant.

I want my research outputs to remain identifiable and citable independently of whatever website or platform happens to be popular at a particular moment.

Humanity has spent decades inventing increasingly elaborate ways to lose PDFs, so persistent identifiers seem like a reasonable countermeasure.

Why I use HAL as well

If Zenodo is the central repository for my research assets, HAL plays a different but complementary role.

HAL, the French national open archive, is particularly interesting from the perspective of European research infrastructure.

My interest in HAL is not simply about obtaining another place to upload the same PDF.

It is about placing my research within a broader open-science ecosystem.

For a researcher interested in international collaboration, European research networks, and eventually programs such as Horizon Europe, this matters.

Research infrastructure is not neutral.

Where research is deposited, how it is identified, how it can be discovered, and how it can be connected to other researchers all affect its visibility.

That is why I do not see Zenodo and HAL as competing repositories.

I see them as complementary layers.

Zenodo gives me a flexible, DOI-centered environment for research objects.

HAL gives me another institutional and European-facing layer of open dissemination.

The goal is not to upload the same file everywhere for the sake of collecting profile pages.

The goal is interoperability.

ORCID is the identity layer

Repositories solve one problem.

They tell the world where the research output is.

ORCID solves another.

It tells the world who produced it.

This distinction becomes increasingly important as a research portfolio grows.

Names are surprisingly unreliable identifiers.

There can be multiple researchers with the same name. Names can be transliterated differently. Publications can appear under different institutional affiliations. Researchers can move between universities and organizations.

An ORCID iD provides a persistent identifier connecting the researcher to their scholarly activities.

For me, this makes ORCID part of the infrastructure rather than a decorative profile page.

My basic architecture therefore looks something like this:

Researcher identity → ORCID

Research outputs → Zenodo

European/open repository layer → HAL

Research discovery → scholarly indexes and research profiles

Code and reproducibility → GitHub and related infrastructure

These systems serve different purposes, but together they form something much more useful than a collection of disconnected profiles.

Why not simply use arXiv?

I still consider arXiv extremely important.

For certain fields, particularly mathematics and computer science, arXiv has enormous disciplinary visibility.

If the primary objective were simply to distribute a technical preprint to a specific research community, arXiv would often be an obvious choice.

My objective is broader.

Much of my research is interdisciplinary.

My interests include dynamic systems, non-classical logic, game theory, computation, complex systems, ethics, philosophy, computational social science, and related areas.

That creates a problem.

A research project does not necessarily fit neatly into one disciplinary repository.

Zenodo’s broader scope is therefore useful for the type of research portfolio I am building.

I am interested in publishing not only papers, but also the surrounding intellectual and computational artifacts.

That makes Zenodo particularly suitable for my workflow.

So my choice is not:

Zenodo good, arXiv bad.

It is:

Different repositories solve different problems.

And for my current research strategy, Zenodo is the better central hub.

Open science as infrastructure

There is another reason I take this seriously.

I do not want open science to mean simply:

“I uploaded a PDF and made it publicly accessible.”

That is useful, but it is only the beginning.

A more mature approach is to think about research as an interconnected information system.

A paper should have a persistent identifier.

The researcher should have a persistent identifier.

The code should be discoverable.

The data should be documented when appropriate.

Versions should be distinguishable.

Research outputs should be machine-discoverable.

Repositories should expose metadata.

The entire structure should ideally be interoperable with other scholarly systems.

This is especially important as research becomes increasingly computational.

A modern research project can behave more like a software project than a traditional printed article.

The PDF is the visible interface.

Behind it may be models, datasets, code, formalizations, documentation, and revision histories.

Treating all of those components as research assets makes much more sense to me than treating the PDF as the entire research project.

Why Horizon Europe is part of the picture

This infrastructure also connects to a longer-term objective.

I am interested in eventually participating in the European research ecosystem, including Horizon Europe.

That does not mean that having a Zenodo account, an ORCID iD, or a HAL profile somehow qualifies someone for Horizon Europe.

It obviously does not.

European research funding is not a Pokémon collection where acquiring enough profile pages unlocks the legendary grant.

The point is different.

If I want to participate seriously in international research collaborations in the future, I should build the infrastructure required for those collaborations before I need it.

That means having:

a persistent researcher identity
publicly accessible research outputs
stable scholarly identifiers
reproducible research artifacts where appropriate
an internationally discoverable research record
an open-science workflow
research outputs that can be connected across platforms

I would rather build this infrastructure now than discover ten years later that my research history is scattered across personal websites, expired links, social-media posts, and forgotten cloud folders.

Building before scaling

There is a broader principle behind this strategy.

I am still building my research career.

That means I have an unusual opportunity.

I can design the infrastructure of my research activity from the beginning instead of trying to reconstruct it later.

The scale of the research portfolio may currently be modest compared with established laboratories and universities.

But infrastructure does not need to wait for scale.

In fact, the opposite may be true.

The earlier persistent identifiers, versioning, open repositories, documentation, and reproducibility practices are incorporated into the workflow, the easier it becomes to scale later.

My objective is therefore not to imitate the publication strategy of an established professor.

It is to construct a research system that can eventually support international collaboration.

The bigger picture

My preference for Zenodo is ultimately part of a larger philosophy of research.

I want research outputs to be:

persistent, identifiable, interoperable, accessible, and reusable.

Zenodo provides an important part of that infrastructure.

HAL provides another.

ORCID provides the identity layer.

GitHub can connect research with computational work.

Scholarly indexes and research profiles provide additional discovery layers.

None of these platforms is the research itself.

They are infrastructure around the research.

That distinction is important.

The ultimate goal is not to accumulate profile pages.

The goal is to make the research easier to discover, verify, cite, reuse, and connect with other researchers.

And if the long-term objective is participation in international research networks and eventually Horizon Europe, building that infrastructure early seems considerably more rational than waiting until the application deadline to discover that nobody can figure out who produced what.

For me, Zenodo is therefore not an alternative to serious academic publishing. It is part of the infrastructure that makes serious open research possible.

That is why I use Zenodo heavily, maintain HAL and ORCID carefully, and think about research dissemination as an infrastructure problem rather than merely a publishing problem.

The paper is only one node.

The research ecosystem around it is the real system.

DEV Community: 根本卓哉 Takuya Nemoto

Still an English Developing Country: Japan's English Problem, Its Real Limits, and the Isolation of Japanese Engineers

TL;DR

The numbers

English as a status symbol

Where the limits really are

How this isolates Japanese engineers

Why this matters now

Breaking out of isolation

Wrapping up

The Quiet Boycott of edX and Coursera: How Japan's Contrarian Love of Reading in Japanese Spreads Anti-Intellectualism

TL;DR

The quiet boycott

Reading in Japanese as a contrarian badge

Why I call it anti-intellectualism

The irony: we're good at this

What we lose

How to break the boycott

Wrapping up

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

TL;DR

What I mean by "spiritually Western"

The orthodoxy: Horizon Europe

The underground: DEV and Academia.edu

The paradox: overlooked places can become your home

But the underground isn't enough on its own

The bridge: CV HAL and Zenodo

CV HAL: a legitimate identity

Zenodo: giving underground work a DOI

My workflow: living in both worlds

Pre-flight checklist

Wrapping up

Japan Just Joined Horizon Europe — Here's How I'm Getting Open-Science Ready with CV HAL and Zenodo

TL;DR

What happened?

What actually changes?

The catch: open science is mandatory

CV HAL: your researcher business card

Zenodo: DOIs for papers, data and code

My workflow

Pre-flight checklist

Wrapping up

Why I Prefer Zenodo Over arXiv: Building My Research Infrastructure with HAL and ORCID for a Future in Horizon Europe

DEV Community: 根本卓哉　Takuya Nemoto