Use of Open Access Electronic Journals by Chinese Scholars, and an Initiative to Facilitate Access to Chinese Journals

Surveys were carried out with two groups of Chinese scholars – one group working in China, and a second group working in the UK. The objective was to investigate usage of Chinese-language scholarly journals and the potential for them to use an Open Access business model. The results were compared with those published by the CIBER group at university College London, whose sample of scholars was international in scope. The overseas Chinese group made very little use of journals published in China, and one of the reasons for this was the difficulty of accessing the electronic versions of these journals from the West. We therefore proposed the construction of an English-language website to provide access in the first instance to the full texts of journals published by the members of the Society of China University Journals in the Natural Sciences (SCUJNS), and we created a pilot version of this website