Scholarly Communication at the Crossroads in China

By Jingfeng Xia

Scholarly Communication at the Crossroads in China follows the dichotomy paradox to focus on both achievements and challenges at every step of the scholarly communication process, highlighting Insights and trends in academic infrastructure and scholarly behaviors within the context of local economic, political, and technological development.

Since China adopted an open-door policy in the late 1970s, it has experienced a dramatic economic transformation. With a growth rate around 10% over the past three decades, China is now the second largest economy by nominal gross domestic product and by purchasing power parity in the world. Economic success has impelled restructurings in almost all aspects of the social and cultural settings. Among other changes, the new pursuits of education, research, and scholarship have redefined the academic community with its development across generations and ideologies.

• Provides a large picture of scholarly communication in China, with official data, interviews, and personal observations
• Includes the latest multidisciplinary information, covering education, library science, and information science
• Contains diverse formats, including charts and tables, with dichotomy examples
• Presents historical and contemporary coverage, analyzing data from 1978 onwards in a cultural, economic, social, and political context
• Focuses on changes by taking readers through the complex process of scholarship transformation

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Jan 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9780081005422

Jingfeng Xia

Dr Jingfeng Xia is the Dean of the Library and University Collections, East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, USA. Previously he worked at the University of Arizona and the University of Florida Libraries. He has published extensively on scholarly communication, applications of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in library management, and digital repositories.

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Introduction

The Paradox of Scholarly Communication in China

Since China implemented an open door policy in the late 1970s, it has experienced a dramatic economic transformation. With a growth rate around 10% over the past three decades, China is now the second largest economy by nominal gross domestic product (GDP) and by purchasing power parity (PPP) in the world.¹ Its economic success has impelled restructurings in almost every aspect of the social, cultural, and political settings. Among other changes, the new pursuits of education, research, publishing, and information technology have redefined the academic community with its development and transmission being taken across generations and ideologies.

The contemporary practices of scholarly communication in China are characterized by a great degree of diversification. In higher education, private schools have effectively eroded the long-standing monopoly of government-controlled public institutions, providing various types of training that were once foreign to the country, such as vocational education and liberal arts resources. In the field of scholarly publishing, an increasing number of open access journals have been introduced to supplement traditional publications, and Chinese is no longer the only language used in publications and communications. In the preservation of scholarly documentation, a heavy reliance on digitization has been the norm in library and information professional services, while China as a country with thousands of years of civilization has a tradition of treasuring its archives and antique books and, therefore, has paid special attention to the conservation of its cultural heritage as well.

Even though the practices are diverse and complex, dichotomy may be the most appropriate word to describe the dynamics of modern scholarly communication in China. Contrasts have penetrated into every area of the system. At one end, internationalization has been officially promoted in an effort to increase the visibility of Chinese scholarship in the global marketplace, with individuals being encouraged to publish in foreign journals and participate in cross-country collaborative projects. Various policies on the institutional level have been created to provide incentives for international contributions, e.g., one article in a SCI-indexed journal is considered to be equal to several core-journal articles published in China for the purpose of faculty tenure and promotion. At the other end, localization has been strongly emphasized for the adaptation of research content to meet the sociocultural, philosophical, political, and economic requirements of the home country. The radical connection between scholarly activities and political sensitivity can be readily sensed though not always documented.

The divide has many other presentations. A well-known fact is the widespread plagiarism by those who wrongfully copied the sentences and ideas of another without providing an appropriate citation to the original sources. The Chinese pedagogic traditions and contemporary laws have made the measure of plagiarism and copyright violations ambiguous, which of course cannot be used as an excuse. However, on the other hand, the number of inventions by the Chinese has also climbed rapidly in recent years. The Chinese government has made great investments in scientific discoveries and innovations, which have yielded encouraging results. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization,² China applied more patents than any other country in 2012, with a total of 652,777 applications, although it was ranked third, after Japan and the United States, on the number of granted patents in the same year.

A splitting of quantity and quality in education and publication is another observation of modern scholarly communication in China. Since 2008 China has outnumbered the United States in its doctoral student enrollments on a per year basis, which represents an expansion of about 24% a year since 1978.³ Although not all the graduates go into academia, this huge expansion will inevitably impact the landscape of scholarly conduct. However, the large majority of institutions of higher education cannot provide a matching number of qualified professors to supervise these students. This is because of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976 when all doctoral programs were stopped. At the beginning of the economic reforms in 1978, only 18 students were undertaking doctorates in the entire country.⁴

A long list of contradictory practices in Chinese scholarly communication can exist, depending on how one identifies, classifies, and interprets them. For conciseness I present only one more opposite group here, namely, peer review and guanxi. Readers in the West are aware of the process of peer review in scholarly activities as the means of evaluation of scientific or professional work by others in the same field. Peer review is exercised to retain standards of quality, mostly for the purpose of publishing where reviewers are typically anonymous and independent in order to help facilitate unvarnished criticism. In China peer review is also a standard method of determining a project’s suitability for publication, grant making, or other similar arrangements. Nonetheless, in reality it has been eroded by guanxi in some ways and to a certain extent. In Chinese society, guanxi has traditionally played a central role in fostering interpersonal ties. Everyone in a personalized network has the obligation to maintain the relationship and prevail upon others in the network to perform a favor or service, or to be prevailed upon. This reciprocal obligation, when improperly held, may conflict with the nature of anonymity in a peer review process and may produce negative dynamics in the quality control of scientific outcomes.

The transformation process of the scholarly culture in modern China is as complex as what the culture itself has manifested. Commercialization and globalization have been the main driving forces and are made possible by relevant policies implemented by the government, institutions, publishers, libraries, and other organizations. Commercialization encourages competition among individuals and academic units, and the competition has become increasingly strong because of a continually increasing number of higher education graduates. In 2013 there were a total of about seven million graduates from institutions of higher learning at all levels, of which nearly half were unable to locate placements within six months of graduation.⁵ Although doctoral students consisted of only a small percentage of the population, the majority of undergraduates who did not secure a job upon graduation chose to enroll in graduate schools, making the future of the job market for doctorates even gloomier.

Similarly the impact of globalization policies on scholarship is very noticeable. My school asks us to at least take a semester-long visiting scholarship overseas and publish two articles in English in order to get promoted to full (professor), said an associate professor at a mid-sized university during my interview of him for one of my research projects. He complained: My English is far from writing a philosophy article. Like all his peers, he took English classes in high school and colleges but did not use it in his daily and professional life. Researchers in hard sciences such as mathematics, physics, and chemistry are luckier because they have more opportunities to conduct international collaborations. English, when used in scientific writing, is much easier to manipulate than in the writing of soft sciences because the structure and language are conventional in scientific writing. The impact of globalization policies goes far beyond language use and can be found on almost every issue of Chinese scholarly communication, which ranges from reorganization of higher educational institutions to the introduction of open access initiatives.

The idea of writing this book grew out of a course that I taught for several years at Indiana University’s School of Library and Information Science (it now is a department in the School of Informatics and Computing). The course, Scholarly Communication, which began as a topical course and developed into a regular one after three years of instruction, covered many key subjects on scholarly communication and academic librarianship. Each time I taught this course, I used it as an opportunity not only to introduce students to important concepts and practices but also to design manageable research projects for them to conduct in-depth investigations of contemporary issues. Through collaboration, the students in this course and I published several peer-reviewed articles in top library and information science journals.⁶,⁷ Now it is time to focus my study on scholarly communication in a particular country, that is China, where I was born, grew up, and received some of my education.

Scholarly communication is defined by the Association of College & Research Libraries as the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use.⁸ Borgman regards scholarly communication as a term to include the formal and informal activities associated with the use and dissemination of information through public and private channels.⁹ In this book I take a broader definition of scholarly communication that looks at a process in which scholars are trained and scholarship is conducted and evaluated. The chapters in this book are arranged to reflect this process so that education is first discussed followed by the descriptions of scholarship creation and preservation, namely practices in publishing and librarianship. The last chapter examines the impact of Chinese scholarship upon scientific research, in the form of citations, on a worldwide basis.

Each chapter follows a dichotomy paradox to focus on both achievements and challenges at every step of the communication process. Insights and trends in academic infrastructure and scholarly behaviors are described within the context of local sociocultural, economic, political, and technological development. Readers can expect to obtain an impression on the uniqueness of scholarly communication in modern China, while being able to observe an evolutionary trajectory of the communication dynamics from the late 1970s, or even earlier times, onward. As the title of this book indicates, scholarly communication in China is at a crossroads. Seldom is one able to wholly decipher the heterogeneity and predict the directions. I have made a great effort to present a critical examination out of magnificent yet piecemeal data, evidence, and events, and have attempted to minimize biases because of personal assessment and the confounding variables selected. However, it is the readers’ responsibility to interpret and make conclusions about Chinese scholarly practices.

This book covers various topics on scholarly communication only within mainland China. Similar practices in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan are not included. Readers interested in the current development of these latter areas are advised to consult other related books, periodical articles, and web content, such as the book, Scholarly Communication in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, edited by the author and published by Chandos Publishing.

All charts, tables, and figures are prepared by the author using as authoritative resources as possible. A Chinese dynasty timeline is attached as Appendix 1 at the end of this book to help readers better understand the descriptions of the historical background in individual chapters. Chinese characters inserted in text are in simplified forms that are used in China after 1956. Another appendix is provided to list their traditional equivalents that were used in China before 1956 and are now in use in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan.

References

1 The World Bank. China Overview, 2016. http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/china/overview (accessed June 16, 2016).

2 The World Intellectual Property Organization. Global Patent Filings See Fastest Growth in 18 years, 2013. http://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2013/article_0028.html (accessed June 16, 2016).

3 Maslen G. The Changing PhD—Turning Out Millions of Doctorates. University World News, 266. 2013.

4 Group of Eight. The Changing PhD: Discussion Paper. Turner, ACT: Group of Eight House; 2013.

5 Gu Y. In China, Higher Education Brings Few Guarantees. Time. 2013 (4 July).

6 Xia J., Gilchrist S.B., Smith N.X.P., Kingery J.A., Radecki J.R., Wilhelm M.L., Harrison K.C., Ashby M.L., Mahn A.J. An Overview of Open Access Mandate Policies. Portal: Libr. Acad. 2012;12:85–102.

7 Xia J., Harmon J., Connolly K., Donnelly R., Anderson M., Howard H. Who Publishes in Predatory Journals? J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 2015;66:1406–1417.

8 Association of College & Research Libraries. Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication 1. http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/whitepapers/principlesstrategies (accessed June 16, 2016).

9 Borgman C.L. Scholarship in the Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press; 2007 p 48.

Chapter 1

Preparations

Who?

Abstract

Higher education in China is introduced by following a historical framework, yet with an emphasis on its current situation. Policy implementations in the past four decades and their influences on the transformation of higher learning in such areas as college preparation, admissions, the population of students and faculty, the building of institutional infrastructure, and so on are briefly described. The chapter focuses on explaining various binary practices in higher education, including an unequal distribution of educational resources between junior and senior faculties as well as between urban and rural students.

Keywords

History of higher education; Gaokao; Cram school; College life; Universities.

A simple search in Google using scholarly communication cycle as the search term for images would return copious diagrams that model a scholarly communication lifecycle with each traceable movement of scholastically related work, which, in some cases, subordinates a knowledge cycle, a publishing cycle, an access cycle, and the like. The majority of these models represent an understanding of librarians and publishing professionals toward scholarship creation, assessment, dissemination, preservation, and use. Rarely does a diagram, however, acknowledge higher educational training as the necessary preparation in a knowledge cycle, through which the future scholars are exposed to a broad array of academic fields and modes of inquiry and through which students develop their abilities in critical thinking and problem solving to succeed in the areas of their choice. The consideration of higher education as an integral part of the scholarly communication process becomes particularly relevant when referring to the fact that higher educational institutions have made the dominant contributions to scientific explorations in most countries, including China, and have helped prepare generations of scholars. In the following descriptions, the terms school, university, college, and institution are used interchangeably unless otherwise