Censorship of Online Research Journals in China

中国在线研究期刊的审查

• 批准号: 2389449
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University College London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2389449
• 关键词: Censorship; Online; Research; Journals; China

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.

这项研究首次调查了学术出版商在中国审查制度中的参与情况。自2017年以来，应国家监管机构的要求，学术出版商限制了对中国研究成果的获取。LexisNexis（隶属于爱思唯尔母公司RELX）和Taylor & Francis已从出售给中国大学的销售包中删除了一个法律信息数据库和83种学术期刊。由于图书馆预算和开放获取的限制，期刊出版商越来越依赖于美国和欧洲以外的新兴市场的收入增长。与此同时，在中国等国家，学术话语的范围已经缩小，特别是在香港的内乱、新疆维吾尔族受到的迫害以及新型冠状病毒COVID-19在武汉的起源方面。这些事件对学术研究进入中国市场的条件提出了紧迫的问题。这些审查措施在多大程度上影响了中国资源的可用性？他们是否鼓励学者进行自我审查？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？这是首次借鉴政治理论的研究成果，建立学术期刊审查制度的理论模型。一些评论家质疑“审查制度”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，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。这两家机构对中国的法律框架也没有任何影响，中国的法律框架禁止传播政治敏感材料。然而，就学术记录是智力工作的综合体而言——它本身是文本，也是语料库——出版商限制访问内容集中的个别文章的行为本质上是编辑性的。这些干预措施可能是正当的，因为不准确或研究伦理问题，或者由于外部压力使研究结果模糊，从而损害了强大的个人和机构。任何区分一种干预形式与另一种干预形式的努力都必须考虑代理人编辑学术记录的动机。CUP和b施普林格Nature的行为似乎构成了自我审查，因为它们与中共的内容限制沆瀣一气，而中共的内容限制是出于避免政治责任的愿望。我的主要研究将对这种审查形式的后果进行实证建模。我将对20-30位研究在中国受到审查的学者，以及20-30位在中国研究期刊市场具有专长的出版专业人士进行深入的、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索文章级审查鼓励自我审查的观点。这将是第一次对涉及受影响亚洲研究文献的学术自我审查进行定量研究。该博士学位的主要成果将是一份风险分析报告，从声誉损害、研究交流障碍和各种抵制形式的财务后果等方面对审查共谋的影响进行建模。本报告的目的是利用我在学术出版领域的专业联系以及在研究过程中建立的进一步联系，通过出版伦理委员会和国际出版商协会为行业指南提供信息。