Open and Shut?: The Open Access Interviews: Deputy Director General of the Bureau of Policy at the National Natural Science Foundation of China

"On May 15 both the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) announced new open-access policies.  Both funders’ policies will require that all papers resulting from funded projects will have to be deposited in online repositories and made publicly accessible within 12 months of publication — a model pioneered by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008, when it introduced its influential Public Access Policy. As a result of the new Chinese policies there will be a significant increase in the number of research papers freely available, not least because it comes at a time when the number of papers published by Chinese researchers is growing rapidly. In reporting news of the policies, Nature indicated that Chinese research output has grown from 48,000 articles in 2003, or 5.6% of the global total, to more than 186,000 articles in 2012, or 13.9%. Of the latter figure, more than 100,000 papers, or 55.2%, involved some funding from the NSFC. Below I publish a Q&A conducted by email with Prof. Yonghe Zheng, Deputy Director General of the Bureau of Policy, NSFC ..."