(3 Dec 2023) A newly established database represents China’s latest step towards open access publishing, but major obstacles remain if the country is to revolutionise its model of scholarly communication, experts said.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) recently launched PubScholar, an academic database that offers free access to about 170 million science resources, including over 87 million articles, more than 1 million dissertations and nearly 63,000 books. A range of CAS institutions and national partners have supported the project, which describes itself as being designed to “meet the basic needs of guaranteeing academic resources” for society as a whole.
PubScholar is regarded as an attempt to rebalance the distribution of academic resources away from CNKI, the country’s largest academic database, which was fined after an anti-monopoly investigation last year and over privacy breaches this September.
One problem faced by the new platform is the limited amount of open access publishing happening inside China. In a statement, PubScholar’s leaders invited high-quality domestic and overseas journals to join the initiative. “Since the number of Chinese journals that this platform cooperates with is relatively small, willing Chinese journals are particularly welcome to join the cooperation,” it emphasized.
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