This is a presentation given at the ICAS9 international conference. It draws on Joseph Nye’s concept of ‘Soft Power’ to explore the role that OA is playing in helping to reshape publishing and scholarship in China. It introduces the green and gold open access developments in China and discusses the dynamics and constraints in increasing the status and impact of Chinese scholarship and re-positioning China as an international leader in open knowledge movements.

1. Open Access Scholarship
and China’s Soft Power
Dr Xiang Ren （USQ, Australia)
Dr Lucy Montgomery (Curtin University, Australia)

2. Associate Professor Lucy
Montgomery
Curtin University,
Australia

3. The Concept of Soft Power
• Joseph Nye
Soft Power refers to an ability to
achieve political ends through
attraction and co-option, rather
than by coercion or payment

4. The sources of a nation’s soft power are much more
likely to emanate from civil society than government,
from cultural value rather than propaganda and
from cooperation rather than competition.

5. Academic publishing is an
important but neglected
institution of Soft Power

6. China’s academic publishing
system
• Publication-oriented evaluation
and “academic GDPism”
2,680,395 scholarly documents
indexed by the Scopus database；
China is ranked at just 207 in the
world in terms of citations per
published document (6.17)

7. “Over 95% of China’s most important
(public-funded) research outputs are
published by foreign publishers; China
has to spend money to buy these
publications back for domestic research
and education.”
• Over dependence on international academic publishers

8. Soft Power in An Open Age
• Joseph Nye: the impact
of Internet and ICTs on
Soft Power
• Open knowledge
movements, from
universal accessibility to
university participation

9. Openness as a catalyst?
• Premier Li： ‘… establishing a publically funded
mechanism for Open Access (OA) to scientific
knowledge in order to bolster the common
development of scientific research in China and the
world’
• CAS and NSFC issued OA mandates in 2014

10. What is Green Open Access?
Researchers can deposit a version of their published work
into a subject-based repository or an institutional
repository. Every university in Australia has a repository for
this purpose.
What is Gold Open Access?
Researchers publish in an open access journal, where the
publisher of a scholarly journal provides free online access.
Business models for this form of OA vary. In some cases,
the publisher charges the author’s institution or funding
body an article processing charge (APC).
Quoted from the Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG)

11. Open Access Journals
• Good journals go OA: 55% make content OA
immediately upon publication (no embargo period)
and 91% do not charge APCs (Sample: 308 OA STM
journals supervised by CAST)
• Poorly internationalized: only 58 indexed by DOAJ
• The China OA Journals (COAJ): 788 OA journals, half a
million visits, 83.3% from within China

12. National level OA repositories
• The Chinese Academy
of Science (CAS) IR Grid
• Launched in 2013, integrated 89 CAS
IRs
• 1/3 of full-text items are English
language papers published by
international journals
• 400,000 articles, 14 million
downloads, 40% from overseas

13. Discussion: Dynamics of OA
• Widen access to research and reduce cost to
access foreign content
• Increasing global visibility of Chinese scholarship
and reshape international image
• Opportunities of academic publishing going
abroad

14. Discussion: Dynamics of OA
• Reforming research and innovation systems:
productivity, transparency, inclusiveness,
efficiency and social justice
• Re-cast China as a leader and innovator in open
knowledge
• Open Ideologies and China’s soft power

15. Discussion: Constraints
• Language and cultural barriers
• The ‘heavy hand’ of government
• The averagely poor awareness and willingness of
academics to go open

16. Conclusion
‘The growth of an open, transparent and inclusive
national research and innovation system,
supported by high-quality, digitally appropriate
mechanisms for scholarly communication, will be
the real source of China’s soft power in the OA
age. Nothing less than the transformation of the
ways in which scholarship is governed and
supported will be needed in order to achieve this.’

17. Dr Xiang Ren
Australian Digital Futures Institute,
University of Southern Queensland
|email: xiang.ren@usq.edu.au
|Twitter: @renxiangcn
|Slideshare:
http://www.slideshare.net/XiangREN
|Academia.edu:
https://usq.academia.edu/XiangRen