The NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute (NHK BCRI) has been making its research results available widely to the public through publications such as The NHK Monthly Report on Broadcast Research and on its official website but has not released raw data from public opinion surveys for a long time because of the protection of personal information and other reasons.
While overseas countries launched a number of data archives in the 1960s, to promote data storage and publication, Japan lagged behind in establishing archives and had to wait until 1998 when the University of Tokyo set up the Social Science Japan Data Archive (SSJ Data Archive) to make raw data available to the public. Consequently, the NHK BCRI started to receive requests from academic researchers for the provision of raw data, which made the Institute commence discussion on it. After determining the conditions on academic archives that could receive data as well as on surveys whose data would be released, the Institute decided to provide some of the raw data to the SSJ Data Archive in stages. Since then, for the past decade, NHK BCRI has provided raw data from twenty surveys including the Survey on Japanese Value Orientations, receiving 346 requests for data use, and 34 research papers with secondary data analyses have been published.
This paper reports the background to and the process of the decision making of the Institute as well as the current status of its raw data provision.