(19 May 2021) The digitization of Chinese classics is challenging, as Chinese ancient characters are complex. Throughout history, one Chinese character might have several variants and written forms. Digitizing Chinese ancient books through optical character recognition (OCR) not only facilitates machine reading but also gives a new life to numerous ancient books for public peruse. …
(11 Jun 2021) The killing of a university Communist Party secretary by a lecturer at China’s prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai has shocked academics in China, unleashing a debate on pressures to perform and publish, research demands and precariousness of university jobs in China. Jiang Wenhua (39), a teacher at the school of mathematical…
(10 Jun 2021) The new site of Shanghai Archives has opened to the public free in the Pudong New Area. It is China’s biggest provincial-level archives. The site on Baiyang Road features an exhibition on Shanghai’s history since it opened its port in 1843 and visitors can search the archives free. Some 4.6 million…
(3 Jun 2021) China is working on a master plan for the internationalisation of its domestic journals and plans to pursue an open science strategy at a national level. That was one of the main messages of a session at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Society of Scholarly Publishing (SSP) held last week, and hosted…
(6 May 2021) The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Chinese Association of Science and Technology (CAST) to deepen cooperation in three aspects: the ‘Innovation China’ platform, impact assessment studies of Chinese scientific research output (including a focus on Open Access) and international knowledge exchange. Under…
(22 April 2021) The National Library of China (NLC), in collaboration with nine other libraries across the country, has made over 1,700 sets of ancient books available digitally, in a bid to preserve the books and make them more accessible to the public. The newly uploaded resources, including copies of ancient books in the…
(18 Apr 2021) Chinese authorities have ordered primary and secondary schools to rid their libraries of books that may lead to veneration of the West at the expense of promoting patriotism. The move by the Ministry of Education took effect around April 1. Elementary, middle and high schools are expected to focus on so-called Xi…
(21 Apr 2021) F1000 is collaborating with two Chinese customers to develop open research publishing platforms dedicated to the research and application of collaborative robots and ‘digital twin’ technologies. Both will be the world’s first open publishing platforms in their fields and will launch for submission in July 2021. The platforms will utilise F1000’s open…
(14 Apr 2021) On the last day of 2020, the Chinese Academy of Sciences issued the first Early Warning List of International Journals. While it includes just 65 journals, the list disproportionately targets journals that are fully open access (OA) and attract a high volume of Chinese content in absolute or relative terms, notably IEEE Access, several…
(3 Apr 2021) Growing numbers of Chinese universities are dropping the requirement for PhD students to publish papers in journals in order to graduate. It has already been dropped from graduation requirements at the country’s pre-eminent institutions, Tsinghua and Peking universities, as well as the Chinese Academy of Sciences. And now there is pressure for…