Online sharing of research papers must be fair

A girl receives her father's encouragement before she takes the independent college recruitment exams on Feb 19, 2011, in Beijing.

MANY UNIVERSITIES have been complaining since March about the rising cost of using data from China National Knowledge Infrastructure, or CNKI.net, a digital platform of knowledge resources. Some lawyers suspect CNKI.net is abusing its "monopoly" in academic papers' collection and could be violating the Anti-Monopoly Law. China Youth Daily commented on Wednesday:

Despite claiming to be just a "carrier of digital papers", CNKI.net has become an indispensable aid for researchers to complete their theses or dissertations. A media survey found that, in 2014 the website charged Yunnan University 700,000 yuan ($106,236), instead of the original 400,000 yuan, for quotations. In 2013, Capital Normal University paid CNKI.net 1.5 million yuan, which rose to 1.8 million yuan in 2014 and 2.16 million yuan in 2015.

The website has been raising its rates by 10 percent or more every year, and it does not negotiate the rates. Increasing the prices in such a way is contrary to the original intention of establishing HowNet－to share and disseminate academic achievements.

As an academic database, CNKI.net should be operating at low profit, because the data it shares with researchers and scholars are not its property; it is just a transport hub of knowledge. Also, it should pay royalties to the authors for sharing and disseminating their works. And only the intervention of higher authorities can ensure it does.