Censorship of Online Research Journals in China

这项研究是第一次调查学术出版商参与中国审查实践的情况。自2017年以来，应国家监管机构的要求，学术出版商限制访问中国的研究成果。剑桥大学出版社(CUP)和施普林格自然出版社已经从他们的在线平台上删除了1315篇期刊文章，这些文章的关键词包括“天安门”、“西藏”、“新疆”和“香港”。LexisNexis(爱思唯尔的母公司RELX所有)和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信息数据库和83种学术期刊。由于图书馆预算和开放获取授权的限制，期刊出版商越来越依赖美国和欧洲以外的新兴市场的收入增长。与此同时，中国等国家的学术话语范围有所收窄，尤其是在香港的内乱、新疆维吾尔族人的迫害以及新型冠状病毒新冠肺炎在武汉的起源等方面。这些事件引发了关于进入中国学术研究市场的条件的紧迫问题。这些审查努力在多大程度上影响了中国的资源可获得性？他们是在鼓励学者自我审查吗？学术出版商应该如何回应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理论工作来建立学术期刊审查的理论模型的研究。一些评论人士质疑，“审查制度”是否适用于学术内容发行商(出版商)和采购商(进口商)之间的商业交易，这两家公司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图书的书面文本。这两家机构对中国的法律框架也没有任何影响，该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完整的智力工作实体--本身就是一个文本，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动具有编辑性质。这种干预可能是出于不准确或研究伦理方面的担忧，或者是因为外部压力要求掩盖破坏有权势的个人和机构的研究成果。任何将一种干预形式与另一种干预形式区分开来的努力都必须考虑到代理人编辑学术记录的动机。CUP和Springer Nature的行为似乎构成了自我审查，因为他们与中共的内容限制同谋，这是出于逃避政治责任的愿望。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名在中国进行过研究审查的学者和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。这将是第一次涉及受影响的亚洲研究文献语料库的学术自我审查的量化研究。该博士论文的主要成果将是一份风险分析报告，模拟审查共谋在声誉损害、研究交流障碍以及各种抵抗形式的财务后果方面的影响。这份报告的目的将是通过出版道德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，为行业指导方针提供信息。

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.