It is time-consuming and labor-intensive to fight a lawsuit with CNKI.

89-year-old professor Zhao Dexin defended his rights for 5 years. The result was that he won all the lawsuits and received more than 700,000 yuan in compensation. However, his thesis was also removed from CNKI.

Afterwards, CNKI proposed that it would properly handle the issue of the continued dissemination of Zhao Dexin's works on the CNKI platform.

But now, in the CNKI database search, you can find the book "Modern Chinese Economic History" written by him, but the paper is still not visible.

From the perspective of scholars, the removal of a large number of papers from CNKI is tantamount to being "blocked" and forgotten by academic history.

  HowNet has brought Chinese academics to the Internet, which is a consensus.

This does not only refer to the more than 200 million Chinese documents included in CNKI.

It also includes tens of millions of students and scholars, 10,320 journals, and more than 30,000 universities and research institutions.

On the blue-hued website of CNKI, the network of an academic community is shaped.

According to the 2019 report officially provided by CNKI, its users cover 33,000 institutions in 56 countries and regions around the world, with 200 million individual readers.

The number of daily visits reached 16 million, and the annual download volume of the full text was 2.33 billion.

  Zhu Jian, the former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Nanjing University, commented that the CNKI model has surpassed its own production and operation, and has a more core function: to regulate the roles and relationships of authors, journals, readers and CNKI.

  At the beginning of the formation of this huge network, my country's copyright laws and regulations are still being perfected.

The way it obtains papers from academic journals and universities is now considered illegal by legal scholars and cannot be supported by the courts.

The distribution of benefits between CNKI and academic journals, universities, scholars, and students is also considered to be "obviously unfair."

  But when people discovered this, it was hard to break free from the net.

As of February 8, with "China Academic Journals (CD Version)" Electronic Magazine Co., Ltd. as the party, 288 rulings and judgments with copyright as the key word were retrieved on the China Judgment Document Network.

After Zhao Dexin sued CNKI, Zhu Jian wrote, "Professor Zhao Dexin is not the first to challenge the CNKI model, nor will he be the last, but the most sensational one so far."

network

  An editor of an academic journal told China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily that CNKI is "like air" to all those who do academic research in mainland China.

No one can leave the air.

  A professor who studies Qing history says CNKI is the database he clicks most often.

The library of Chinese classics and ancient books that are commonly used by professionals and Guoxue.com should be ranked at the back.

For a while, he was annoyed that the journal "Qing Shi Lun Cong", which he frequently read, did not upload his papers to CNKI.

Because it is very convenient to search the database, there are fewer paper publications in the library. He wants to find an acquaintance and call to find the articles in this magazine.

When he saw a graduate student writing a thesis, he was told by his supervisor that "the literature collection is incomplete", and the student was very confused: "Why is it incomplete? I found it on CNKI."

  The director of the library of Chongqing Technology and Business University told reporters that in the database usage survey conducted by the school's library, two of the top three databases with the highest usage rate were from CNKI.

  In the invitation letter of a core legal journal, the author is required to "attach the name, professional title, unit name, and screenshot of the author's 'knowledge network node' on CNKI" with the paper, so as to reflect the author's historical publication data.

Many colleges and universities still have rigid standards when evaluating professional titles, requiring submission of screenshots of published papers on CNKI to prove the truth.

Someone posted on the Internet and asked, "If you don't go to CNKI, is it a non-genuine journal?"

  According to Liu Xu, a special researcher at the National Institute of Strategic Studies of Tsinghua University, this "inseparable" is a "lock-in effect".

"The so-called lock-in means that the supply side or the demand side cannot switch. There may be a substitute, but the substitute cannot make people completely abandon it." He believes that CNKI has formed a typical "two-way lock" on upstream and downstream.

On the one hand, the lock-in effect exists in the raw material market—suppliers of academic papers, universities, academic journals, etc.; on the other hand, it exists on the demand side, that is, university libraries and scientific research institutions that purchase databases.

  Zhu Jian, the former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Nanjing University, felt that CNKI had gone deeper.

In his view, CNKI is based on massive resources, relying on a set of derivative functions to embed itself in the scientific research system and realize the deep binding of scientific research workers.

He said that CNKI is a "fake and a tiger with power", and the fake is the "power" of the scientific research system. The infringed scholars "are not unable to win the lawsuit, but to fight the lawsuit, and maybe they have to catch up with their academic future, which is not worth the loss. ”.

  He analyzed that the derivative functions of HowNet have a major feature: "Most of them do not directly serve academic research, but are more to meet the needs of the current scientific research system and the scientific research management of administrative rights under the academic journal system. The most typical ones are various rankings. List and Duplicate Check System".

  But people are not always aware of the restraint from this academic web.

The former editorial director of a journal of a university of science and technology in Nanjing said that the authorization contract between them and CNKI is signed every few years.

Sometimes when it expires, I don’t renew the contract, but I don’t care, and I still upload each paper to CNKI as usual.

"I don't know if it is forgiving us, or we are forgiving it."

  She said that everyone knows that there are many problems with this network, but "if Professor Zhao hadn't mentioned it, it would not have become a topic in the editorial department, because this fact is too old, and it has been ignored and ignored over time."

Infringement and Invisible Journals

  Master's and doctoral dissertations and journal papers are the two major sources of literature on CNKI.

According to Cong Lixian, Dean of the School of Intellectual Property at East China University of Political Science and Law, CNKI has violated the two paths of obtaining papers.

  According to the official website of CNKI, it has collected more than 380,000 doctoral theses from 470 doctoral-granting institutions since 1984, and more than 3.67 million master theses from 753 master training institutions; journals.

  In colleges and universities, inclusion starts with a "dissertation authorization agreement".

A master student at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law was told by a counselor when graduating in 2021 that "everyone must sign" the dissertation authorization agreement.

The school's agreement reads: "I authorize Zhongnan University of Economics and Law to compile all or part of the content of this dissertation into the relevant database." Such clauses are common in the university's "dissertation authorization agreement".

  Cong Lixian said that such a clause "doesn't give any benefit to students, so this right must be taken away, which is not in line with the fairness principle of contract law".

He explained that the school has the right to preserve the dissertation and provide catalog search and reading services on campus.

However, the terms of "disclosure" or inclusion in other off-campus databases are open to question.

If there is a dispute due to copyright issues, "the school will not win the lawsuit if the school presents the dissertation authorization statement."

  In the editorial office of an academic journal, inclusion begins with a "copyright notice" or "contract".

Zhang Hongbo, Director-General of the China Copyright Association, has conducted an investigation and found that the copyright declarations of academic journals are similar to the copyright declarations. The full text of this journal is digitally reproduced, compiled, distributed, and disseminated through the information network in the database product. The company's copyright royalties are paid together with the journal's remuneration. The author's submission of articles to this journal for publication is deemed to agree to the above statement of our journal. "

  The former editor-in-chief of a university journal in Henan told reporters that CNKI asked them to post this manuscript.

  Zhang Hongbo said, "The author did not stand up to deny it. You cannot take it for granted that the author ignored it. The current Civil Code and Property Law do not recognize this. This does not form a contractual relationship."

  In the case of Professor Zhao Dexin v. CNKI, the judgment of the court also confirmed this statement.

In fact, the Regulations on the Protection of the Right to Disseminate Information on the Internet published in 2006 have clearly stipulated that making the works of others available to the public through the Internet requires the permission of the rights holder and payment of remuneration.

This is different from the provisions of my country's Copyright Law on reprinting and excerpts from paper newspapers and periodicals, which do not require prior authorization, but only need to pay for the author's remuneration.

  Even so, this non-legal copyright notice has been around for many years in academic journals.

This is largely related to the characteristics of Chinese academic journals.

Zhang Hongbo said that the academic journals he contacts rarely have dedicated copyright operators.

A former editor-in-chief of the journal told reporters that several editors of the journal have to undertake the task of teaching professional courses, and the journal does not even have an editorial office.

  Zhu Jian has been the Executive Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Nanjing University since 1997. He clearly knows that most Chinese academic journals do not have the qualifications and identities of market players, relying on administrative grants, and the distribution income is low. Some journals have not even been sold since their inception. pass.

For them, getting reliable distribution and dissemination channels is more important than increasing distribution revenue.

When CNKI appeared more than 20 years ago, most journals did not have a clear copyright (copyright) awareness.

HowNet provided a shortcut to digitization, and journals accepted it along the way.

  He said that, as an important part of copyright disputes, academic journals are invisible in cases and public opinion.

Because the journal did not obtain the legal authorization of the author as agreed, CNKI became the defendant, and CNKI could hold the academic journal responsible, but CNKI never held it accountable.

Zhu Jian said that this was because they knew that "what the journal signed was an agreement that could not be fully performed even if it wanted to." According to him, there was no entrusted authorization in the format agreement signed by CNKI and the journal. specific agreement.

For example, CNKI will pay authors according to what standards and time limit for authorization.

Therefore, obtaining the author's legal authorization is an impossible task for the journal.

  Moreover, if CNKI held the journals accountable, they could only recover the meager remuneration they paid to the journals, which would also arouse the antipathy of the journals and affect the stability of the data source.

According to a survey by China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily, 4 university journals receive annual remuneration ranging from 1,000 to 6,000 yuan from CNKI, and some "exclusive journals" are said to be worth 10,000 yuan.

But such remuneration is "in name only" to the editorial department.

There are hundreds of authors in the journal in a year, and there is not much to be divided, so the money simply stays in the editorial department.

The former director of the editorial department of a journal of a science and engineering university in Nanjing said that the money from CNKI is calculated according to the number of downloads, which varies from year to year, and how much is given is counted.

The staff had "hinted" that the money did not need to be sent to the authors of the paper and could be retained by the editorial department.

  Regarding this point, Zhu Jian reminded his peers 15 years ago: "Each journal is facing dual risks of infringement and breach of contract: infringement for the author and breach of contract for the database." Once a lawsuit occurs, the journal will be very passive, " I'm afraid no social science journal can afford to lose such a lawsuit."

  In 1997, when Zhu Jian was the executive editor of the Journal of Nanjing University, the Journal of Nanjing University had been added to the database of Chinese academic journals (CD version).

After CNKI was launched in 1999, it was necessary to re-sign the editorial agreement. "I think CNKI's formatted agreement is not fair and has legal risks, so I refused to sign until CNKI agreed to negotiate."

Therefore, the agreement between NTU News and CNKI was finally revised one by one.

As far as he knows, most journals directly sign and seal the format agreement drawn up by CNKI without negotiation.

"Journals are in fact passive or passive." He has always advocated that journals should join forces to negotiate with CNKI. Since 1998, he has suggested on various occasions that the National University Journal Research Association should pay attention to copyright issues and negotiate with journal databases. , but the appeal has not been answered for more than 20 years, and he has nothing to do.

  Zhu Jian recalled that in the mid-to-late 1990s, before the digital transformation of most media, academic journals began to digitize.

However, "the first contact has become the most thorough transfer of power. From the beginning of digitalization, academic journals have completely handed over digital publishing and dissemination to a third party - market-oriented companies such as CD-ROM electronic magazines. In China, no one has voluntarily given up digital copyright like this and completely let a third party operate." Zhu Jian said.

  In this way, academic journals have lost the initiative in digital transformation.

HowNet disassembles all journals into single documents and sells them in a unified package.

Zhu Jian believes that to a certain extent, the imprint of journals in academic communication has been erased, and HowNet seems to have become the only "big journal" in academic communication.

  In 2021, the Central Propaganda Department, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Science and Technology jointly issued the "Opinions on Promoting the Prosperity and Development of Academic Journals", emphasizing that efforts should be made to create a number of world-class well-known journals that represent the national academic level.

Zhu Jian felt that the problems faced by the journals were serious.

"What do we use to compete with the international academic journal publishing giants, is it relying on academic journals that are still centered on paper publishing, a large number of isomorphic but single-handedly independent information, or relying on miscellaneous information, gigantic but without borders, no independent information How can the journals be considered world-class, how can they participate in international competition, and how can they win the academic discourse power for China?”

Raising Prices and Passive Libraries

  In the downstream of this academic chain, which is participated by CNKI, the buyers represented by university libraries have also been complaining for a long time.

  Cheng Huanwen is a member of the expert group of the Ministry of Education's Chinese Colleges and Universities Literature Resource Assurance System (CALIS), a member of the expert group of the Chinese College of Education Humanities and Social Sciences Documentation Center (CASHL) of the Ministry of Education, and the former director of the Sun Yat-Sen University Library.

At the beginning of the 21st century, he noticed the problem of CNKI's dominance in the market and the constant increase in prices.

At that time, he wrote a letter to CNKI, and the letter mainly said: "Data providers and universities have a symbiotic relationship, and they cannot kill chickens and get their eggs." But more than ten years later, the price has continued to rise.

  As the deputy director of the Ministry of Education's College Graphics Work Committee, in 2016, when the Peking University Library stopped the CNKI database to resist price increases, he privately "asked them to persevere", "if necessary, you can tell them that Peking University is a family If you are bullied like that, all colleges and universities across the country will stop purchasing HowNet."

  Later, Peking University and CNKI reconciled, and he did not know the content of their final agreement.

But in recent years, he feels that CNKI is "more and more hard-hearted".

In December 2021, he and dozens of university libraries in Guangdong Province negotiated with CNKI.

The condition given by HowNet is to increase the price by 12%, while the range given by other databases is 3-5%.

According to his recollection, CNKI’s attitude was that “if you don’t drop a penny, you will follow the company’s unified regulations.”

"Everyone said that it would be reduced by 0.1%, but that's not enough. There are so many people who can't negotiate, and everyone is angry. There is no way to do it. Everyone is frozen."

  Cheng Huanwen's anxiety also comes from the tight library funding.

In 2019, China's library funding levels peaked, he said, and public library budgets have been reduced every year since then due to the COVID-19 outbreak and public spending cuts.

Coupled with inflation, the overall purchasing power of the library has shrunk considerably.

Shrinking funding and rising prices mean that libraries can only buy fewer and fewer resources.

  "Library only has so much money, regardless of the reality of the library, the result is that the library can't afford it in the end. What's the benefit for the data business?" "What kind of education and cultural power do we want to build? Caused so much confusion to everyone, (database business) are you not too wolf?" Cheng Huanwen said.

  In Cheng Huanwen's eyes, the pricing mechanism of databases is extremely opaque. For example, CNKI once imitated foreign databases and extracted some journals from the general database and sold them separately.

"More than 150 medical journals were sold for 50,000 yuan alone, while the general database did not drop a penny. No one told me what the price of this database was. I can't tell the reason. It's like a wolf and a sheep, that is, it wants to slaughter you." Cheng Huanwen often met data business representatives at various conferences, and he would say, "We are your parents. This should be a community with interests. To balance."

  There is more than one database of such "wolves".

In 2013, Cheng Huanwen participated in the meeting of the National University Graphics Work Committee. When it comes to resource construction, everyone said, "These suppliers are very difficult to deal with, and they can't even talk about it, and they are facing various difficulties."

They were "extremely angry at the data vendors' pricing strategies, sales strategies and price increases, and agreed that the library community must make a strong voice".

On January 3, 2014, Cheng Huanwen published a blog post "Ten Questions about Data Quotients", which was later called "Cheng Huanwen's Questions" by the library community, triggering an academic discussion on the relationship between libraries and databases.

  A library science researcher participated in that discussion.

He told reporters that the most typical feature of library development in recent years is the rise of external stakeholders.

He said that external stakeholders and the library are in a cooperative and symbiotic relationship, but when the power of external stakeholders is too strong and the penetration of the core business of the library is too strong, the discourse power and professionalism of the library itself will suffer more and more. Serious challenges, he said.

"When the external power has such a strong voice, it is not that it adapts to your needs, but you have to follow it in another direction."

  And this weakness exists not only in the relationship between the library and HowNet, but also in the relationship between the library and large foreign databases.

  In 2008 and 2010, two boycotts of foreign database price increases initiated by Chinese academic libraries ended in failure.

According to Cheng Huanwen's recollection, the international data provider's attitude was tough, saying that "the Chinese market can be given up".

However, the loss of top international academic resources is an unbearable blow for Chinese academia.

"After you stopped it, it was like we were out of food." So "we can only call it back to continue talking", and finally they reached a memorandum of understanding with the international publishing giant Elsevier, which was originally scheduled to change the price in 2020. Raised to the global level, now delayed until 2035.

  Cheng Huanwen felt that this was essentially a transfer of the power to preserve knowledge from public institutions to commercial institutions.

Massive public knowledge is held in the hands of commercial institutions, and there is a huge long-term risk.

"No company can exist forever." He wondered whether the data could be safely and completely preserved if the data provider "died".

The agreement of the academic community in the past 100 years

  In the face of the fierce criticism of CNKI's "unfair" business model on the Internet, Fu Weigang, a researcher at the Shanghai Institute of Finance and Law, put forward a different opinion.

He explained to reporters that academic works are different from literary and artistic works in that they are difficult to make profits, and the greatest value is to spread them out.

Although scholars do not benefit from the works themselves, they can gain greater academic prestige by expanding their dissemination, thereby obtaining more bonuses and speaking fees.

Therefore, he believes that academic communication cannot be strictly regulated by copyright law.

"In the field of scientific research, we must respect industry practices. The agreement of the academic community in the past century must be reasonable."

  This business model has indeed been going on for nearly a hundred years.

Cheng Huanwen commented that CNKI's business model is not fundamentally different from that of global academic publishing giants.

  In 2017, the British "Guardian" sorted out the past and present of this "one-size-fits-all" business model.

The article said, “Throughout human history, it is difficult to find an industry as bizarre as academic publishing: countless researchers contribute and review manuscripts for free, but pay to read papers; research funding from government funding has not allowed researchers to become The high-income group brings publishers a higher rate of return than Apple and Google; the subscription fee is overwhelming the budget, and colleges are afraid to not buy it.”

  This business model, pioneered by publisher Maxwell in the last century, took advantage of scientists' insensitivity to money and not profiting from academic works to turn academic publishing into a good business.

Maxwell himself once said: "(We are) a perpetual money printing machine."

  This is the biggest loophole in this "convention" - publishers are the biggest beneficiaries, taxpayers are forced to bear the double burden, but they do not have the right to gain easy access to intellectual achievements.

Government funding for scientific research and library purchases of databases all cost taxpayers money.

  Scholars are confronted with the question of "It's always been this way, right?"

In 2011, Alan Swartz, one of the co-founders of Reddit, hacked the Jstor papers database, hoping to get papers and make them freely available.

He was later charged with criminal charges and faces a million-dollar fine and up to 35 years in prison.

In 2013, the 26-year-old Swartz refused to plead guilty and chose to commit suicide.

It is said that the genius "defended the openness and freedom of the Internet with his life".

He wrote a manifesto in 2008 that included a line that read, "Information is energy. But like any other energy, some people want to keep it for themselves."

  There are many voices promoting open access to academic achievements.

Open Access (OA) is an action taken by the international academic community, publishing community, and library and information community to promote the free dissemination of scientific research results using the Internet.

Under this model, the author bears the cost of publication, and the work is released to the public free of charge.

  In 2016, a library researcher of Sun Yat-Sen University interviewed several database vendors. When referring to the "open access movement", the database vendors said that this is only an attempt and is not enough to compete with the entire market.

However, in the past five years, he has changed from a student to a scholar, and he has seen that the OA movement is becoming more and more intense, a wave and a direction.

  In 2019, the University of California stopped subscribing to the Elsevier database due to excessive price increases. In March 2021, after a 20-month game, Elsevier and the University of California re-established cooperation.

The University of California has won, not only by reducing subscription prices, but also by making 100% of its papers published in Elsevier's more than 2,500 journals freely available to readers.

  That means a third of UC's academic output is published in OA, the co-chair of the UC negotiating team said in an interview.

In addition, UC has five agreements under negotiation, and if these negotiations are successful over the next 2-3 years, three-quarters of the university's papers will be made available to the public for free.

have to change

  In 2018, Elsevier Global Journal Publishing President Philip Tehegan said in an interview, "China has a huge demand for subscription publishing content. We have not seen the government express its interest in rapidly promoting golden open access publishing. The desire of the model, at least we have not seen the introduction of relevant policies.” Subscription publishing refers to the above-mentioned model of academic publishing over the past century.

The golden open access means that after the author pays the article processing fee, the article is freely available to everyone.

  On October 24, 2017, the Documentation and Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as the first institution in China, signed the Expression of Interest for OA2020 Initiative to realize open access to journal articles on a large scale.

  On May 25, 2020, international publishing giant Elsevier and the Netherlands reached the world's first new national-level partnership.

Compared with the situation in countries such as the Netherlands, my country has not yet clarified the direction of open access at the national level.

  Zhang Xiaolin, director of the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, proposed in "Research on China's Innovation Strategy and Policy 2019" that the national level should explicitly support open access to scientific research papers.

For example, "All institutions that receive public research funding of more than 5 million yuan per year should formulate open access policies for scientific research papers from publicly funded projects, and urge their researchers, especially those working in international academic organizations and international academic journals, to actively Support the open access of scientific research papers, and urge the library of the institution to promote the full open access of the corresponding author papers of the institution."

  However, some people take a wait-and-see attitude towards open access, and some people think that this may increase the burden on scientific research institutions in disguise.

Elsevier Global Journal Publishing President Ter Hegen said in 2018: "Achieving open access is a bit like solving the carbon emission problem. It is very complex and requires joint input from many parties, and it will take a long time to solve this problem.

We cannot expect any institution, country or business to solve this problem tomorrow.

  But Elsevier is moving forward.

According to its official statement, as of October 2020, Elsevier has published nearly 500 fully open access journals, and will continue to accelerate the pace of new publications.

More than 90% of journals published by Elsevier offer the option to publish Gold Open Access.

  Just as CNKI has been positioned as "China Knowledge Infrastructure Project" since its establishment.

Elsevier also has good intentions.

On their century-old publication logo.

An old man stood beside a tall elm tree, the vines were entwined in the tree, lush and lush, and the old man reached out to pick grapes.

In Elsevier's official interpretation, the old man symbolizes scientific research workers, the big tree symbolizes the knowledge that human beings have acquired, and the vine is the link between scientific knowledge and researchers.

They hope that Elsevier is that vine.

On the left side of the screen, two Latin words convey blessings to researchers: "Never Alone".

  Once the old net is broken, a new net needs to be established.

A business model for publishing academic papers that can take into account copyright and dissemination is still being explored all over the world.

In Zhu Jian's view, after Professor Zhao Dexin sued the CNKI case, the CNKI model had to change.

  On December 23, 2021, the State Administration for Market Regulation said in reply to netizens' messages that it would verify and study whether CNKI is suspected of monopoly.

Many researchers worry that the anti-monopoly investigation on CNKI will split this "large and comprehensive" one-stop search database.

"The China Academic Communication Association went back more than 20 years ago." Yuan Ye, a lecturer at the Law School of South-Central University for Nationalities and a researcher in anti-monopoly law, explained that the scale of the database itself is not the original sin, and anti-monopoly does not mean to eliminate the "big and comprehensive" database .

"The anti-monopoly law is not against this kind of structural monopoly, but against its behavior that has the effect of eliminating and restricting competition."

  However, because CNKI has in fact the nature of infrastructure, this is a huge test for my country's administrative law enforcement capabilities in the field of anti-monopoly.

Yuan Ye said, "It is still necessary to carefully consider whether it will be restricted, but will affect the development of academic databases."

  Although CNKI and international publishers such as Elsevier have different business models, database monopoly is a global problem.

Due to different legal systems and anti-monopoly enforcement concepts, there is no precedent for anti-monopoly investigations on databases in the world.

"It is unlikely to find a similar one, but in theory, some experience can be found. If a relevant administrative penalty decision is finally issued based on the evidence of the investigation, it may be the first case." Yuan Ye said.

  Complaints about CNKI's prices have been going on for at least five years, and Yuan Ye guessed that the anti-monopoly law enforcement agency did not conduct an investigation because of the need for more careful consideration.

my country's anti-monopoly law was promulgated in 2008, which is still relatively young.

"Administrative law enforcement agencies are also constantly exploring themselves." Yuan Ye has seen the law enforcement agencies use some advanced concepts in theory in the recently announced decisions on administrative penalties in the anti-monopoly field. In continuous deepening, we already have the ability and relevant knowledge reserves.”

  Guo Yujie Source: China Youth Daily

  Original title: HowNet