Censorship of Online Research Journals in China

这项研究是第一个调查学术出版商参与中国审查制度的研究。自2017年以来，学术出版商应国家监管机构的要求，限制了对中国研究成果的访问。剑桥大学出版社（CUP）和施普林格·自然（Springer Nature）已从其在线平台上删除了超过1，315篇含有“天安门”、“西藏”、“新疆”和“香港”等关键词的期刊文章。爱思唯尔的母公司爱思唯尔（Elsevier）旗下的乐信（Lounge Nexis）和泰勒与弗朗西斯（Taylor & Francis）已经从出售给中国大学的销售套餐中删除了一个法律的信息数据库和83种学术期刊。由于图书馆预算和开放获取法规的限制，期刊出版商越来越依赖于美国和欧洲以外新兴市场的收入增长。与此同时，在中国等国家，学术话语的参数已经缩小，特别是在香港的内乱、新疆维吾尔族遭受迫害以及武汉新型冠状病毒COVID-19的起源方面。这些事件提出了关于进入中国市场进行学术研究的条件的紧迫问题。这些审查措施在多大程度上影响了中国资源的可用性？他们是在鼓励学者自我审查吗？学术出版商应该如何应对未来限制访问政治敏感内容的要求？他们有能力抵制这些要求吗？这样做符合他们的利益吗？这是第一次借鉴政治学理论著作建立学术期刊审查制度的理论模型。一些评论者质疑“审查”是否适用于学术内容分销商（出版商）和采购代理（进口商）之间的商业交易，因为两者都没有改变学术产出的内容，即出售给中国大学的学术期刊和书籍的书面文本。这两个代理人对中国的法律的框架也没有任何影响力，中国的法律框架禁止传播政治敏感材料。然而，由于学术记录是一个智力工作的综合体本身是一个文本，也是一个语料库，出版商限制访问内容集合中的个别文章的行为本质上是编辑。这种干预可能是出于不准确或研究伦理方面的考虑，或者是由于外部压力掩盖了研究结果，损害了有权势的个人和机构。任何区分干预形式的努力都必须考虑到代理人编辑学术记录的动机。CUP和施普林格·自然的行为构成了自我审查，因为它们与中共的内容限制串通一气，其动机是希望避免政治责任。我的主要研究将对这种形式的审查的后果进行实证建模。我将对20-30名研究在中国受到审查的学者以及20-30名在中国研究期刊市场拥有专业知识的出版专业人士进行深入、半结构化的采访。然后，我将使用文本挖掘和情感分析来定量地探讨文章级审查鼓励自我审查的观点。这将是第一个涉及受影响的亚洲研究文献语料库的学术自我审查的定量研究。该博士学位的主要产出将是一份风险分析报告，模拟审查同谋在声誉损害，研究交流障碍以及阻力形式的财务后果方面的影响。本报告的目的是通过出版伦理委员会和国际出版商协会，利用我在学术出版方面的专业联系和我在研究期间建立的进一步联系，为行业指南提供信息。

This research is the first to investigate the involvement of academic publishers in Chinese censorship practices. Since 2017, academic publishers have restricted access to research outputs in China at the request of state regulators. Cambridge University Press (CUP) and Springer Nature have removed over 1,315 journal articles featuring keywords such as 'Tiananmen', 'Tibet', 'Xinjiang' and 'Hong Kong' from their online platforms. LexisNexis (owned by Elsevier's parent company, RELX) and Taylor & Francis have removed a legal information database and 83 academic journals from sales packages sold to Chinese universities. Due to constraints on library budgets and Open Access mandates, journal publishers are increasingly reliant on revenue growth in emerging markets outside the US and Europe. At the same time, the parameters of academic discourse in countries such as China have narrowed, particularly in relation to civil unrest in Hong Kong, the persecution of the Uighur ethnic group in Xinjiang, and the origins of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, in Wuhan. These events raise urgent questions about the conditions of access to the Chinese market for scholarly research. To what extent have these censorship efforts affected the availability of resources in China? Are they encouraging scholars to self-censor? How should academic publishers respond to future demands to restrict access to politically sensitive content? Are they capable of resisting these demands? And is it in their interests to do so? This is the first research to draw on work in political theory to establish a theoretical model for the censorship of academic journals. Some commentators have questioned the applicability of 'censorship' to a commercial transaction between an academic content distributor (publisher) and purchasing agent (importer), neither of whom have altered the content of academic output - i.e. the written text of academic journals and books sold to Chinese universities. Nor do either agent have any influence over the legal framework in China, which prohibits the distribution of politically sensitive material. However, insofar as the scholarly record is an integrated body of intellectual work-itself a text, as well as a corpus-the actions of publishers to limit access to individual articles within collections of content is editorial in nature. Such interventions may be justified in terms of inaccuracy or research ethics concerns, or due to external pressures to obscure research outcomes that undermine powerful individuals and institutions. Any effort to distinguish one form of intervention from the other must account for the motivations of agents to edit the scholarly record. CUP and Springer Nature's actions plausibly constitute self-censorship due to their complicity with the CCP's content restrictions, which are motivated by a desire to avoid political accountability. My primary research will model empirically the consequences of this form of censorship. I will conduct in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 20-30 academics that have had their research censored in China, and 20-30 publishing professionals with expertise in the Chinese market for research periodicals. I will then use text mining and sentiment analysis to explore quantitatively the view that article-level censorship encourages self-censorship. This will be the first quantitative study of academic self-censorship involving the corpus of affected Asia Studies literature. The primary output of this PhD will be a risk analysis report, modelling the impact of censorship complicity in terms of reputational harm, impediments to research communication, and the financial consequences of forms of resistance. The aim of this report will be to inform industry guidelines via the Committee on Publication Ethics and the International Publisher's Association, drawing on my professional contacts in academic publishing and further connections made during my research.