Cooper, George;
(2025)
Censorship of Online Research Journals in China: Conditions of Complicity and Resistance in the Global Scholarly Communications Industry.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This research is the first to investigate the involvement of online journal publishers in Chinese censorship practices. Since 2017, publishers have restricted access to research outputs in China at the request of state regulators. Cambridge University Press (CUP) removed over 300 journal articles and Springer Nature suppressed a further 1,000 featuring keywords such as 'Tiananmen', 'Tibet', 'Xinjiang' and 'Hong Kong' via their online platforms. LexisNexis (owned by Elsevier's parent company, RELX) and Taylor & Francis removed a legal information database and 83 academic journals from sales packages sold to Chinese universities. Due to constraints on library budgets and Open Access mandates, journal publishers are increasingly reliant on revenue growth in emerging markets outside the US and Europe. At the same time, the parameters of academic discourse in countries such as China have narrowed, particularly in relation to civil unrest in Hong Kong, the persecution of the Uighur ethnic group in Xinjiang, and the origins of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. This is the first research to draw on work in political theory to establish a theoretical model for the censorship of academic journals. It also explores empirically the conditions and consequences of censorship complicity in this context. The research involves semi-structured interviews with 12 academics that have faced research censorship in China, and 12 publishing professionals with a mixture of direct involvement in censorship concerns and expertise in the Chinese market for research periodicals. This is followed by a corpus analysis study of 450 censored research articles to identify patterns and changes in term-based censorship criteria. The aim of this thesis is to inform industry guidelines via trade bodies like the Committee on Publication Ethics regarding platform amendments, on political grounds, affecting the global scholarly record.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Censorship of Online Research Journals in China: Conditions of Complicity and Resistance in the Global Scholarly Communications Industry |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Information Studies |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10208222 |
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