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Digital publishing and China’s core scientific journals: a position paper

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Abstract

In this position paper we discuss the current status of the core scientific journals in China. Based on discussions of journals’ relation to a small group of full-text database providers, open access publishing and copyright problems, we conclude that China’s digital publishing industry is not yet in a healthy state and some key issues related to revenue, digital piracy and copyright must be solved.

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Notes

  1. There are 1998 journals covered in CJCR-2010 edition, which was issued by ISTIC in November 2011. Based on our search results in 2006 and 2010, we may deduce that there are about 1,200 Chinese core journals with self-built websites and more than 700 of them adopted open access publishing model in mid-2012.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Aiming Shen, Xingping Liu and Xiaobing Wang for data collection. They thank anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions to improve the style of our presentation. S.L. Ren thanks Dr. Hong Yang from Bryant University for helpful conversations. This work was supported by the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) as a series of projects in 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2011.

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Correspondence to Sheng Li Ren.

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Cheng, W.H., Ren, S.L. & Rousseau, R. Digital publishing and China’s core scientific journals: a position paper. Scientometrics 98, 11–22 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0873-8

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