China is leading in areas of relative weakness in the global publishing system, according to a researcher at the Hangzhou Dianzi University in China
China’s areas of relative weakness have the highest percentage of internationally collaborative papers. China had a lower international-article percentage than any other country in the Nature Index. It is more than the United States in biological science, which is 54.1%.
She says China wants to become more involved in helping to shape how the global publishing system works, and not always follow models and rules set up by Western countries.
Shu Fei, a research scholar at Hangzhou Dianzi University in China, says selection for support under theCJEAP is hard. “It requires an ambitious plan for improvement, and to be indexed in the Web of Science within three years,” he says. If the journal isn’t affiliated with a top university or the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it will be hard to get that index. One journal Shu is involved with, which he helped launch in 2021, has so far been unsuccessful in its attempts to become part of the CJEAP, he says.
“These lists are very important,” says Yang. Universities often have specific requirements for how many publications were in journals considered to be of a higher level. To meet that bar you need to benchmark against preferred lists.
The Future of Open Access in China: Towards a Stronger Economic Power and Political Consequences for Education and Research in the context of China
Although the Chinese government and many leading institutions officially support open access, they remain suspicious of it, says Goncharoff, especially the trend towards gold open access. China is somewhat resistant to gold open access. He says that they see it as a Western business model foisted on them. The gold model costs a lot for China. Goncharoff estimates that if most publishing shifts to gold open access, China might have to spend three to four times more on APCs than it does now, even with some declines in subscription costs.
In China, there is much discussion about what reasonable’s would be to control rising costs. There is funding available for Chinese researchers to pay APCs, but if the cost exceeds about US$2,800, it must be reviewed by an academic committee. Some universities are now rejecting any higher than US$2,000, and there is a suggestion that a reasonable APC is around US$400.
Some of China’s strongest Chinese-language journals in the field of education studies are establishing English versions and are inviting global scholars to join their editorial board, says Yang. They wanted to be international, not just for Chinese authors.
It’s not only infrastructure but it is more than that. The aim of the signature policy is to strengthen China’s ties with its neighbours and other allies in an attempt to increase its economic and political power. The Green Finance and Development Center at Fudan University is keeping track of the BRI. It estimates that China has spent more than US$1 trillion on the initiative since 2013 and that 151 countries have so far signed up to the project and the funding that comes with it.
Part of this is driven by geopolitics, she adds. Several countries, including the United Kingdom and United States, have banned Chinese firms such as Huawei from engaging in projects that involve key technology or infrastructure, such as telecommunications and electrical grids. The European Union is considering similar policies. That has a knock-on effect; researchers in China who are interested in working in these areas don’t change fields — they look for collaborators in other countries.
The top fields of research (FORs) in each of the five subjects tracked by Nature Index are shown. The most dominant FORs across the respective areas are biochemistry and cell biology, at 36% of biological-sciences output, and materials engineering, which represents 34.7% of physical-sciences output. FORs can relate to more than one subject: biochemistry and cell biology is also among the top five FORs for health sciences, for instance.
