"An Open Digital Global South," UC Davis

1. Open Access in China: Some
Issues
JINGFENG XIA
EAST STROUDSBURG UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

2. China joined the open access movement very
early
 The Berlin Declaration on Open Access was initiated in October 2003. The
earliest signatories were only nineteen.
 Two months later in December, the Chinese Academy of Sciences signed
the declaration, making it the twenty-eighth signatory.
 The next May, both the National Natural Science Foundation of China and
University of Science and Technology Beijing became its signatories.

3. Some early open access initiatives in China
 International Conference on Policies and Strategies for Open Access to
Scientific Information, June 2005, Beijing.
 Workshop on Open Access to Digital Scientific Resources, June 2004,
Beijing.
 The Chinese Academy of Sciences is a collaborator of the International
Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), launched in Ghent in
2009.

4. Some selected open access events in China
 In October, 2010, China organized Berlin 8 Open Access Conference, the
first time outside Europe.
 The Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation of
China implemented their open access policies in 2014.

5. Major achievements
 Open access policies
 National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)
 Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)
 Repositories
 CAS Institutional Repository Grid – 112 communities, 290,266 full tests
 China Academic Institutional Repository by CALIS – including 45 higher
educational institutions
 Open Repository of NSFC – 428,670 documents
 Central government operated repositories, e.g., Science Paper Online – 94,707
documents

6. Major achievements Cont’d
 Open access journals
 A total of 685 open access journals, 8.4% of all scholarly journals in China, some
of which are not completely open access
 Open data projects
 National Sharing Platform for Scientific Data
 E-government portals
 National Data Portal by the National Bureau of Statistics
 National Data mobile apps

7. Some issues in the development of open
access in China
 The growth of open access has not been as fast as in other major countries.
 Open access has been for a long time the business of a few major academic
entities.
 Although some repositories have collected a huge number of articles,
overwhelming majority of the articles are not in full text, e.g., PDF files.
 The amount of open access documents has been low in proportion to the value of
China’s GDP, number of total researchers, and quantity of publications.
 Open access as a concept has not been really accepted by regular researchers.

8. Traditions as Obstacles
 The rote learning culture created an inherent preference for science, where
memorization based on repetition allowed learners to quickly acquire
knowledge from others.
 In traditional China, memorizing and copying famous part of classical
documents showed one’s respect to the original authors, and one’s talent
if s/he could seamlessly integrate the part into own work.
 In present China, social stratification in the scholarly community restrict
young scholars from exceed intellectual limit of the seniors.
 Lack of adequately scientific training.

9. Consequences as threats to open access in
China
 Plagiarism: unaware versus intentional
 Tolerance toward piracy
 Duplications
 Unwillingness of authors to make their research outcomes freely available

10. Some solutions
- Already taken, but need further efforts
 Policies to encourage open access publications.
 Policies to penalize plagiarism and unethical behaviors and regulate
research and publishing.
 Financial support from various levels of government.

11. Thank you
May 25, 2017