China plans sweeping makeover of

academic journals to raise the profile

and influence of domestic scientific
research
• The government-affiliated China Association for
Science and Technology plans to add 50 new
academic journals to be published in the country
• The group said that a majority of Chinese scientific
papers continue to be published in Western
academic journals

Coco Feng in Beijing

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Published: 8:00am, 7 Jun, 2022
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China plans to accelerate the reform of the country’s scientific and technical journals. Photo:
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China plans a sweeping makeover of mainland academic journals, turning them into
world-class organs similar to British weekly Nature and peer-reviewed US
publication Science, to raise the profile and influence of domestic scientific research,
local authorities said in Beijing on Monday.

The initiative was announced at a press conference co-hosted by the China Association
for Science and Technology (CAST), a government-affiliated organisation that serves
local scientists, to follow up on the country’s “journal of excellence plan” drawn up in
2019. The group said that a majority of the country’s scientific papers continue to be
published in Western academic journals, while China and the US intensify their rivalry in
next-generation technologies.

“This is indeed a problem,” said Zhang Yuzhuo, vice-president of CAST. The group’s
plan includes adding 50 new academic journals as part of state-backed efforts to
promote Chinese academic journals around the world.

“Our next step is to accelerate the reform of scientific and technical journals and their
digital development,” Zhang said. He indicated that the plan also aims to establish
digital publishing service platforms with international standards, while publishers
sharpen their focus on market competitiveness.

CAST’s latest effort reflects China’s approach to pulling resources from both public and
private sectors to address bottleneck issues and build up advantages in core 21st century
technologies.

Without elaborating, Zhang indicated that China already has some 25 academic
journals that are ranked among the top 5 per cent worldwide. That followed President Xi
Jinping’s pronouncement in 2019 that the country “cultivate world-class scientific and
technology journals”.

China is also expected to allow a number of English-language journals abroad to be

registered in the country, according to Zhang, which would be a big breakthrough in
light of the government’s rigid control of publications.

At Monday’s press conference, Minister of Science and Technology Wang Zhigang said
the country has maintained technological cooperation with 161 countries and regions.
He also indicated that funding for basic research in China reached 2.8 trillion yuan
(US$420 billion) last year, more than double from 1 trillion yuan in 2020.

CAST’s initiative comes nearly a month after the State Administration for Market
Regulation launched an antitrust investigation into China National Knowledge
Infrastructure (CNKI), the country’s largest online academic database operator.

That move followed the decision by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the country’s top
research organisation, in April to suspend use of CNKI because of its hefty annual
subscription fee.

While strengthening the resources for academic journals would help buttress the
mainland’s scientific research efforts, Loet Leydesdorff, a professor at the School of
Communications Research of the University of Amsterdam, cautioned that China might
not be able to retain its current lead in most-cited scientific papers if “it is closing itself
off from the outside world”.

Leydesdorff is co-author of a study, published in the journal Scientometrics on March 2,

that said China surpassed the US in top scientific studies in 2019, four years after the world’s
second-largest economy reached the same milestone against the European Union.

Despite that lofty international distinction in scientific studies, China continues to tackle
cases of plagiarism. This issue has even spawned an online industry in checking services,
following a number of high-profile cases of copied university dissertations.

In 2020, image-analysis expert and former University of Stanford researcher Elisabeth

Bik found that six global journals had published 121 scientific papers that appeared to
reuse identical sets of images, despite covering different topics over a four-year period.
More than a dozen relevant scientific papers written by Chinese researchers in
internationally peer-reviewed journals were withdrawn after an investigation.

Bik and other experts found more than 400 published scientific papers with potentially
fabricated images that were suspected to have been produced by one paper mill in China.

In 2018, China’s top military brass released research integrity guidelines urging leaders in
charge of the country’s defence-related science and technology research to avoid
forgery, plagiarism and other wrongdoing.