Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Christos Petrou, founder and Chief Analyst at Scholarly Intelligence. Christos is a former analyst of the Web of Science Group at Clarivate Analytics and the Open Access portfolio at Springer Nature. A geneticist by training, he previously worked in agriculture and as a consultant for A.T. Kearney, and he holds an MBA from INSEAD.
Amid ongoing industry disruption (Plan S deliberations in Europe, a rumored executive order in the US, and contentious negotiations for PAR/RAP deals with consortia around the world), news of a changing evaluations policy by the Chinese administration is unlikely to have been welcome news for international publishers.
Anything that affects publishing habits in China has the potential to affect domestic and international publishers. According to Clarivate’s Web of Science (WoS), authors affiliated with Chinese organizations contributed to 20% of research articles and review articles (the types of content that matters the most commercially and academically) in 2018 (Figure 1). The share of China exceeds 30% for two of the top eight publishers. Moreover, China has been a key driver of content growth for many international publishers in recent years.
New policy and old habits
This post by Scholarly Kitchen resident Chef Tao Tao, captures the main points of the two documents that were issued in February. The summary sheet below contains key information from that post, hopefully without much misinterpretation.