he NII Research Center for Knowledge Media and Content Science (KMCS) was established to research and develop services that collect and integrate scholarly information and make it available in a useful form to a wide range of users.

Sharing research results widely is an essential and indispensable part of scholarly activities. Beginning with analog search, such as the accumulation and retrieval of information using library catalog cards, the collection and retrieval of information through digital information has become common today. Furthermore, , with the recent progress of open science and the advancement of digitization, the distribution of scholarly information has changed dramatically.

With the development of open science, a variety of scholarly information has become publicly available and shared. Until now, scholarly information was a specific type of information, such as books and journal articles. However, in open science, a wide variety of research results are now required to be made public. New types of research results, such as research data and software, are now made public. Research results are not only categorized into journal papers and international conference papers, but also into various categories such as preprints and author's version papers. In addition, not only research results but also research processes are being made publicly available. The information that makes research possible, such as the researchers involved, institutions, projects, and research grants, is now widely shared. In this way, a new, diverse, and expanding world of scholarly information is emerging.

At the same time, the advancement of digitization is providing new ways to utilize such scholarly information. The handling of scholarly information, which is becoming more diverse and increasing year by year, requires the identification and integration of information through the use of persistent identifiers (PIDs). The PID graph, which is composed of such PIDs linked together, offers a new way to use scholarly information in addition to simple search. Furthermore, recent advances in artificial intelligence have made it possible to extract information from summaries and text information, and even to support the understanding of articles. It is necessary to realize scholarly information distribution that addresses these latest technologies.

The Center promotes research and development to develop NII's scholarly information infrastructure including CiNii and to realize an academic knowledge infrastructure.