Open access and soft power: Chinese voices in international scholarship

Abstract

Networked digital technologies and Open Access (OA) are transforming the processes and institutions of research, knowledge creation and disemination globally: enabling new forms of collaboration; allowing researchers to be seen and heard in new ways; and reshaping relationships between stakeholders across the global academic publishing system. This paper draws on Joseph Nye's concept of 'Soft Power' to explore the role that OA is playing in helping to reshape academic publishing in China. It focusses on two important areas of OA development: OA journals and national level repositories. OA is being supported at the highest levels and there is potential for it to play an important role in increasing the status and impact of Chinese scholarship. Investments in OA also have the potential to help China to re-position itself within international copyright discourses: moving beyond criticism for failure to enforce the rights of foreign copyright owners and progressing an agenda that places greater emphasis on equality of access to the resources needed to foster innovation. However, the potential for OA to help China to build and project its soft power is being limiteded by the legacies of the print era, as well as the challenges of efficiently governing the national research and innovation systems.

Understanding Open Knowledge in China: A Chinese Approach to Openness?

“…Chinese-language scholarly content is readily accessible for most Chinese academics and university students and widening access to research beyond Universities is not seen as a priority for either researchers or the government. The problems facing scholarly communication in China tend to be framed as relating to quality and transparency, rather than to cost and access (Ren and Montgomery 2015). Predatory 'pay to publish' operators and academic fraud and corruption are seen as particularly urgent problems that will need to be solved if China is to succeed in transforming its research and innovation sectors (Lin and Zhan 2014).…”

Understanding soft power discourse in the National Library of Australia

“…This is seen in the internationalisation of higher education (Bislev, 2017; Lo and Pan, 2021; Tyler and Van Leuven, 2020), library partnerships and exchanges (ALIA, 2018, pp. 4–5), and open access (Ren and Montgomery, 2015). Further research in these areas may extend beyond a soft power framework to emphasise the role of university libraries in knowledge diplomacy (Knight, 2017), with care taken in distinguishing between soft power and knowledge diplomacy concepts (Knight, 2018).…”

Academic Publishing and its Digital Binds: Beyond the Paywall towards Ethical Executions of Code

“…Yet it has also negatively impacts their personal and social lives, and in the long term dilutes the quality of research and the prospect of novel discoveries (Tian et al 2016). Ren & Montgomery (2015) outline how a "lack of transparency in the government-controlled research and higher education system in China" (405) could begin to be addressed with the broader scrutiny, supervision and public benefits of more thoughtful open-access publishing. The authors examine two open-access publishing approaches-"government-initiated national-level…”

“…repositories and publisher-initiated OA journals" (Ren & Montgomery 2015: 395)-which could enhance reach, transparency and efficiency of academic publishing. Given the current state of the market, the first of these-push-back by the state against market mechanisms-appears much more likely to succeed.…”