CNKI and the business of scholarship

1. What is CNKI?

According to press reports, in May 2018 a student at the law school of Soochow University, Liu, tried to download a paper called Traditional Chinese Medicine from CNKI (the China National Knowledge Infrastructure) and was told that seven yuan was payable. He clicked to buy and a top-up page appeared; it offered several payment methods, but every one required a minimum of 50 yuan. Having paid in 50 yuan and bought the paper, he found that the balance could not be refunded, and he sued CNKI. The court held that CNKI's minimum top-up rule and its charge for refunds infringed consumers' right to choose freely and restricted their rights, being unfair and unreasonable terms, and that they should be held void.

CNKI is an academic platform launched in 1999 by Tsinghua University and Tsinghua Tongfang. Formerly the China Journal Net, it covers foreign-language, industrial, agricultural, medical and health, economic, educational and other digital materials, data and literature, and is the largest and most comprehensive database of academic journals in China. When the actor Zhai Tianlin asked on a livestream, innocently enough, "what is CNKI?", he not only put himself in the spotlight but returned CNKI to the centre of discussion: high charges and high profits, yet extremely low payments to the authors of the papers, a gross margin of 61.23 per cent and annual revenue of 970 million yuan. The gulf in CNKI's academic business provoked a strong public reaction.

Reporters have recently found that the top-up page on CNKI's website has been updated with an "other" option, so that users may pay in whatever amount suits them, which meets consumers' varied needs. Whether CNKI's charging model is lawful, reasonable and fair is still worth considering.

2. Is CNKI a monopoly?

CNKI forms part of China's knowledge infrastructure project and holds more than 95 per cent of formally published Chinese academic resources. It carries the task of turning documents into data, and its vast holdings give it a large share of the market for document retrieval: neither universities nor researchers can easily work around it. Faced with year-on-year price rises and no substitute product, many universities and individuals have no choice but to accept, and users' right to choose is in practice taken away.

As a database supported jointly by the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Science and Technology and several other ministries and commissions, CNKI is by its nature allowed a degree of monopoly. With tens of thousands of users, negotiating and bargaining with each one is both impracticable and enormously costly, so it is understandable that CNKI should use administrative means to set prices and to collect documents, and a dominant position in the market is not in itself prohibited by Chinese law. Article 17 of the Anti-Monopoly Law of the People's Republic of China prohibits an undertaking with a dominant market position from selling goods at unfairly high prices or buying goods at unfairly low prices. Whether there has been an abuse of dominance is therefore the key question in any finding of monopoly.

As a commercial enterprise, CNKI may properly charge fees to keep operating, but a price rise of 10 per cent or more every year is hard to justify as covering costs. Nor is it easy to explain why CNKI should earn large profits from downloads and reads while paying the original authors a pittance. Establishing an abuse is a complex process that requires thorough investigation, argument and analysis. What is beyond doubt is that CNKI, while attending to its commercial profit, should hold to its social responsibility and to its original aim of sharing and adding value to knowledge across society, and that the state should regulate and intervene at the appropriate time.

Charging for knowledge can promote its production and innovation and can demonstrate a platform's value. But where knowledge is monopolised, the government should act. A single dominant database may integrate resources to the greatest extent, yet it deprives consumers of room to choose. With data storage as convenient as it is today, building new public-interest databases is not difficult; that would put pressure on the incumbent, lower the threshold for sharing and disseminating scholarship, and ensure that public knowledge is available to the public as widely as possible.

Scholarship should not become a business. Knowledge resources are made public not only for academic exchange and development but in the hope that scholars will keep breaking new ground on the basis of existing research and bring fresh strength to the academic world.