China Looks to Purge Academia of 'Trash Journals'
Mara Hvistendahl
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6054/301.full

In China's booming economy, there are many ways to get rich. For a husband-and-wife team on Hainan, an island off China's southern coast, scientific publishing was their cash cow. For 7 years, Guo Hong and Fu Li operated 20-some journals, collecting a reported $1.5 million in publication fees from thousands of contributors. They solicited papers through elaborate Web sites, offering a discount on the publication fees common in China. But the journals were fake, provincial authorities allege. Upon receiving submissions, the couple would print up only a few copies—journal titles included Chinese Applied Nursing and Chinese Medicine Forum—to send to the author. Guo and Fu were detained in March; prosecutors have not yet filed charges.

The highly publicized takedown is one of several recent efforts to clean up China's academic publishing industry. In a country where low publication standards abound and every university or institute, it seems, has its own journal, the Chinese government is getting serious about raising standards. Although the Hainan journals fraud is an outlier, it's symptomatic of a larger problem: slapdash and irrelevant publications read by next to no one. At most Chinese journals, “the academic level is not high,” Li Dongdong, vice director of the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP), which regulates publications in China, noted in a speech in December. She estimated that two-thirds of journals are “not market-oriented.”

As Chinese science barrels ahead, a few of its journals are getting international attention, and leading Western publishers have set up shop on the mainland in response. But the country's 4700 scientific periodicals include a hefty number of what the Chinese press refers to as “trash journals.” Despite being second only to the United States in total papers published from 2006 to 2010, China ranked at the bottom of the top 20 countries for citations per article over the same period, with just 1.47 citations on average, according to Elsevier's SciVerse Scopus database and SciVal Spotlight country matrix, compared with 5.16 for the United States. It doesn't help that many institutions in China offer fat rewards for publishing in overseas journals with high impact factors. For example, according to its Web site, Guangzhou Medical University doles out 300,000 yuan ($47,000) to lead authors on papers in journals with impact factors of at least 15—a level no Chinese journal has attained. (In Thomson Reuters's Journal Citation Reports, top-ranked journals in categories such as cell biology and biochemistry can show impact factors of over 30.)

As an antidote, GAPP has begun rolling out a series of reforms aimed at boosting the prestige of Chinese publishing. “GAPP has been given heaps of money to spend,” says Torsten Weise, a Berlin-based consultant who advises foreign publishers on operating in China. In the past 2 years, GAPP has secured billions of dollars in loans from state banks, with the “major goal,” Weise says, of internationalization: building journals and publishers capable of becoming multinational.

China's 12th 5-year plan, in effect since March, sets a heady goal for journals. It calls for making cultural production—including media and publishing—a “pillar” industry. GAPP has moved swiftly. Earlier this year, the agency closed six obscure publications and reprimanded two others for violations that included indiscriminate printing of up to 200 papers per issue, over the limits set by publishing licenses. Then last summer, officials unveiled China Science and Technology Media Group, one of a handful of flagship publishers due to be rolled out over the next few years to compete with foreign rivals such as Wiley, Elsevier, and Springer. Li has talked about GAPP supporting a group of select academic journals; editors are unclear when funding might materialize.

The malaise has deep roots. The proliferation of journals is tied to the danwei, or work unit, system put in place after 1949. As the government brought institutions under central control, academic work units—often university departments or institutes—launched journals to publish their scholars' work.

Fast-forward to the 1990s. With Chinese science opening up, academic centers shifted course and began rewarding scientists for publishing in journals listed in indices that track citation rates. Pressure to publish piled up, and although only a few thousand Chinese papers a year then made it into journals indexed by Thomson Reuters, authors seeking to get into print in both Chinese and English-language outlets proliferated. Mediocre danwei-linked journals gladly solicited papers from outside scientists and began charging steep publication fees. (These can now top $1000.) And so the early journals persisted, constituting what Cong Cao, a scholar of Chinese science at the University of Nottingham, U.K., calls a “phenomenon with Chinese characteristics.”

Today, the few stars that have emerged are published in English and focus on areas in which China is strong, such as cell biology, nanoscience, and materials science. They have risen quickly: In 1999, the highest impact factor of any Chinese journal was 0.5 (Science, 26 November 1999, p. 1683). Today, China's top indexed journal, Cell Research, has an impact factor of 9.4.

China's leading journals have made their mark by bringing on international editorial boards, wooing editors from top-shelf Western publications—Cell Research poached deputy editor in chief Li Dangsheng from Cell in 2006—and taking stabs at branding, such as shedding China-specific names in favor of more international monikers. Others, including Chinese Medical Journal and Science China Life Sciences, are experimenting with open-access platforms. “We have to change the way journals are run,” says Gang Pei, editor-in-chief of Cell Research. He has cultivated relationships with societies and accelerated response time for submissions from leading researchers.

The vast majority of journals have little hope of following that recipe. Their day of reckoning is not long off. “There is no need to keep poor-quality journals around,” says Meng Zhao, development editor at Neural Regeneration Research. “By administrative measures or by market measures,” Pei says, “there will be some kind of cleanup.”