The CJEAP and the Beijing Belt and Road Initiative: Searching for new perspectives in Chinese research, says Yue-Jin Fei

The composition of international research interactions is shifting because of China’s rapid expansion, according to the Nature Index. Specifically, China’s researchers are increasingly working with scientists in countries taking part in the Beijing government’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

She says that China wants to become more active in helping to shape how the global academic-publishing system works and not always follow models and rules established by Western countries.

Being selected for support under the CJEAP is not easy, says Shu Fei, who studies scholarly communication at Hangzhou Dianzi University in China. “It requires an ambitious plan for improvement, and to be indexed in the Web of Science within three years,” he says. That indexing can be difficult to attain if the journal is not affiliated with a top university or the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the country’s largest research institution, in Beijing. One journal Shu is involved with, which he helped launch in 2021, has so far been unsuccessful in its attempts to become part of the CJEAP, he says.

The lists are very important. She says universities will often require specific requirements for how many publications are in journals deemed to be of a higher level. “So, to meet that bar you need to benchmark against the preferred lists.”

The Green Finance and Development Center in China: Progress of the Business Intelligence Research Initiative (BRRI) in Education and Science and a Survey of the Nature Index

The Chinese government and many leading institutions are suspicious of open access, especially the gold open access trend. “China is quite resistant to gold open access. They see it as a Western business model that is being foisted on them,” he says. It may be costly for China to have the gold model. Goncharoff estimates that if most publishing shifts to gold open access, China might have to spend three to four times more on APCs than it does now, even with some declines in subscription costs.

There has been a lot of discussion in China about whatreasonable’s APC should be for controlling costs. There is funding available for Chinese researchers to pay APCs, but if the cost exceeds about US$2,800, it must be reviewed by an academic committee. Some universities have started rejecting any APC above US$2,000, and there are suggestions that a reasonable APC is around US$1,200.

Some of the strongest Chinese-language journals in the field of education studies are also establishing English versions and are interested in welcoming scholars from around the world to join their editorial board. “They’re not just for Chinese authors, they want to be properly international.”

In reality it is about far more than just infrastructure. It is the policy of the President of the People’s Republic of China to strengthen ties with neighbours and other strategic partners around the world to boost its economic and political influence. The Green Finance and Development Center at Fudan University in China is keeping a watch on the progress of the BRI. It estimates that China has spent more than US$1 trillion on the initiative since 2013 and that 151 countries have so far signed up to the project and the funding that comes with it.

The researcher at the Ohio State University in Columbus who focuses on public policy that relates to science and innovation says she is not surprised. “I did a study for the US state department, looking at all of the diplomatic agreements that China has made on science and tech with different countries, and we could see a tremendous rise In BRI collaborations.

The Nature index shows the fields of research in five subjects. The most dominant FORs across the respective areas are biochemistry and cell biology, at 36% of biological-sciences output, and materials engineering, which represents 34.7% of physical-sciences output. Among the top five FORs in health sciences, biochemistry and cell biology is among the ones that relate to more than one subject.