Universities seek to overcome Chinese open access resistance

A new push has been launched to overcome historical resistance to open-access publishing in Chinese academia, making several Chinese-language monographs freely available for the first time.

Open Books Hong Kong has been created by the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), City University of Hong Kong (CityU) and the University of Hong Kong (HKU), and is initially releasing nine arts and humanities titles. While the librarians behind the project hope to attract a wider readership and disseminate scholarship from the island further afield, they must also overcome a wider perception in China that quality should be paid for.

Hong Kong’s leaders have embraced open access in recent years, setting out a plan in 2021 to build “the infrastructure and culture” for free-to-read academic publishing. Mainland sector leaders have also signalled support but the issue is still perceived as a relatively low priority, and there is a lack of consistency in open access mandates.

“We’re trying to make available the great research that's being produced by our researchers, that’s been peer reviewed by experts in their fields and that is published by our high-quality university presses to actually benefit a wider readership than the few hundred books that we might sell at best,” said Benjamin Meunier, CUHK’s university librarian.

Of particular significance is that the titles, which focus on topics including Chinese history, politics and arts, are all in the Chinese language. 

“Chinese books are usually not as readily available so starting as a pilot project, we [will] make some of them available and then that can reach a larger population,” said Stella Pang, CityU’s university librarian. 

However, the librarians said that there were still concerns in Hong Kong that implementing open-access research could result in quality being compromised. 

“There’s an assumption that if you pay for something, it is going to be better quality than if it’s free,” said Mr Meunier. 

“A lot of people still think a certain class of publication should be paid and should be closed,” agreed Flora Ng, university librarian at HKU. “Having said that, I think the world is moving in an opposite direction. In Asia, we’re just starting, so we have a long way to go.”

And, while there are hopes for expansion, the scheme is likely to remain small in scope because of limited university budgets. 

“If we are successful, what we want to do is to go to the research funders that hold the purse strings of the system to request a more sustainable footing for this approach as a way of disseminating open-access monographs,” said Mr Meunier. 

In the UK, academics recently criticised proposals that would require long-form outputs to be free-to-read within two years of publication if they are to be submitted to the Research Excellence Framework, raising concern about the cost of publishing charges.

“There’s a real tension between universities spending a huge amount of time, resources and money on producing outputs, and then we stumble on the last piece of actually making that available,” said Mr Meunier.

“Our research systems, whether that's here in Hong Kong or in the West, are not really geared up towards facilitating open access at scale.”

helen.packer@timeshighereducation.com