OA to publicly-funded journals coming in China Jia Hepeng, China launches campaign to boost local journals, SciDev.Net, December 7, 2005. Excerpt: The Chinese government has launched a campaign to encourage Chinese researchers to publish their results in domestic rather than international journals, and to place their results in free archives. "We will gradually make scientists publish research that is funded by the government agencies in leading domestic journals," said Wu Bo'er, director of the Department of Facilities and Financial Support of the Ministry of Science and Technology, at a meeting last week (30 November). At the heart of the campaign is a new fund that will provide financial support to between 300 and 500 of the country's 5,000 scientific journals. The money, whose total amount has yet to be announced, is intended to help the journals improve their editorial and print quality. Some journals will be encouraged to publish in English....At present, papers published by Chinese researchers in journals quoted in the Science Citation Index can bring substantial rewards, such as professorships, research grants and even housing. This has encouraged Chinese scientists to publish their results in foreign journals. To reverse the trend, Wu told SciDev.Net that Chinese scientists may eventually be required to publish their work domestically....Yu Zailin of Peking University disagrees with a ban on publishing in international journals, saying it would impede academic progress. He suggests that instead, Chinese scientists could be asked to write a Chinese paper to be published simultaneously or shortly after their foreign publication....Wang Li, chief editor of Changchun-based Journal of Jilin University, raises another concern. While he accepts that the government's campaign may help to strengthen the country's leading journals, he warns that it could have a less beneficial impact on other scientific publications. "If all Chinese researchers are encouraged to submit their papers to the leading journals, the middle and small-level domestic ones could suffer," says Wang....The government will also fund an online database of the full text of all papers published in journals selected to receive financial support. Both researchers and the public will have access to the database. Comment. I applaud the Chinese plan to improve many of its journals and provide OA to publicly-funded research and publicly-funded journals. However, I also support the concerns of Yu Zailin. One solution is to let researchers publish in the journals of their choice but expect them to deposit copies of their work in OA repositories. This is the approach taken by the NIH, Wellcome Trust, and RCUK. Researchers will still have an incentive to publish in the improved Chinese journals because of their new quality and new access policies.