ISTOCK, NIRODESIGNMore than 1,000 people from around the world have signed a petition calling on major journal publishers not to censor their offerings within China in response to governmental pressure. The petition pledges a peer-review boycott, stating, “we will not agree to provide peer review service until editors confirm that their publications do not censor content in the [People’s Republic of China], and we call on all others to do so as well.”
The petition, launched in October 2017, followed news last summer that some publishers and databases based outside China had received requests from Chinese importers of their print and digital content to block online access to certain academic articles within the country, says the petition’s creator, Charlene Makley, an anthropologist at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Cambridge University Press revealed in August that it had been ordered by its Chinese importer to block access to hundreds of articles in its The China Quarterly journal within the country; it reversed course following an outcry from academics. In October, the Financial Times reported that some articles in Springer Nature’s journals cannot be found within China, including many with terms such as “Tiananmen,” “Taiwan,” and “Tibet.”
The Cambridge University ...
