Nature Network博客上的原文：http://network.nature.com/people/andrewsun/blog/2009/10/20/oa-week-webina-chinas-illy-defined-scientific-journal-policy
On 9:45 Tusday GMT+8 a webina was organized by Zhiming Wang, editor of Nanoscale Research Letters. In the webina Patrick Brown, director of PLoS, gave a talk to the Chinese audience on the OA strategy and the single paper metrics feature of PLoS website.
A surely relevant topic of the survival and development of any journal is the highness of its ‘impact’. Highly concerned by Chinese effort to boost the development of local scientific journals, Patrick criticized strongly, agreed by all Chinese audience, on the ill institution of current Chinese science policy and its destructive effect on journals. In China, number of papers published on higher-impact journals is linked with the promotion and funding of the authors, that is, personal interest. This renders journals with additional economical status, either favorable or unfavorable determined by their “highness of impact”, because personal interest is never met for free in a free market society. An invisible bargain exist between every pair of journal and authorship. By “highness of impact”, one means simply impact factor in China. This, as mentioned by Patrick, conducts a “very destructive punishment” for all new journals, including esp. OA ones. Journals don’t have ISI impact factors for at least two years even they have been indexed. Some journals with ‘experimental’ way of peer-review or distribution process are even not indexed by ISI (e.g. PLoS one). Under China’s current reality, authors get punished if they publish their results on these journals. I wondered how many submission from China does PloS one received each year compared with other non-OA, ISI indexed journals. Patrick had to look up a bit but he answered that in general China ranks almost the lowest in publishing on new journals.
Although the single-paper metrics feature of PLoS journals can be a better alternative to the impact factor of the whole journal when it comes to grading a person in science community, the reason behind the ill policy is much more general and is also influencing other scientific process badly in China; evaluation of a person or institute’s scientific achievement is still to a large extent not conducted by peers but general, ‘macroscopic’, administrative roles, who have nothing more to rely on except quantitative measurements such as numbers of paper, ISI impact factors, h-index. Instead of only referring to the advantage of these measures, they rely on the whole of them including their negative effects which are surely larger.
An atmosphere that appreciates the status of scientific peers, either administrative and cultural, is highly needed, which though is not possible in the current state of education system of China.
