Gaps in Academic Communication - The Scholarly Kitchen

"Recently I saw a LinkedIn advertisement looking for Chinese speaking Associate Editors for the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). I approached Dominic Mitchell who posted the message, and suggested he post a message on Chinese social media. The next day I noticed a post in Chinese by the DOAJ WeChat account, and shared it with my network of STM publishers. There was immediate interest, and issues. The application form was a Google Doc which cannot be opened by Chinese users since Google does not have a license to operate in China. Realizing that this could be a problem, the DOAJ post offered a Word file, available for download from a Google Drive account which was still inaccessible to Chinese users....

A few weeks ago, an old document from a double-first-class university in south China triggered a lot of discussion among researchers and publishers. This internal document states that, “starting from January 1, 2019, papers published in open access journals will not be recognized by the university” in performance evaluation. It was rumored that at least one other top-100 university has the same regulation. As incredible as it sounds, this reflects the perception of open access by many Chinese researchers and publishers. Twenty years ago, the same skepticism on open access publications was not uncommon in the West, but it remains surprisingly prevalent in China.

I also often encounter a lack of interest in open access from Chinese STM publishers, which is perplexing considering how hot this topic has been in the West. I attribute this to the uncommercialized status of STM publishing in China. The majority of journals are fully funded and published by universities or research institutes. Reputation and quality have always been placed above all other metrics, and the business side is much less of a concern. This attitude towards open access is changing slowly. From 2016 to 2019, the total number of open access papers published by Chinese authors in gold or hybrid journals has more than doubled, and the percentage of these papers among all papers by Chinese authors increased by 1-2% every year, to 24% in 2019 (source of data: Dimensions). Meanwhile there is more and more vocal support of open access, so it could be just a matter of time until China fully embraces it...."