Science1 publisher3 min readPublished
China bankrolls its own English-language science journals in a bid for global prestige
China's Journal Excellence Action Plan funds 450 journals and 13 domestic publishers to build prestige titles that China owns outright. One of them is Vita, a fee-free biology journal whose standing will rest on whether leading labs in China and abroad send it their best work.
The Scientist · Science desk
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What happened
- Vita, a biology journal jointly funded by the Ministry of Education's Higher Education Press and Westlake University in Hangzhou, printed its first issue in July.
- Until recently, Chinese universities and institutes typically ran their English-language journals in partnership with international publishing companies.
- Researchers in China paid $909 million in article-processing charges in 2024, nearly 30% of global publishers' income from those fees, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
- Since March, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has stopped paying article fees at 30 of the most expensive open-access journals.
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Why it matters
- cost Every paper Vita accepts is paid for by its funders, so a 20% to 30% US share, the scenario Butcher raised, would have them paying to publish American research.
- constraint For CAS scientists, the 30 dropped journals now cost money their institution used to cover, while a fee-free domestic title costs them nothing.
- exposure International publishers stand to lose part of the nearly 30% of fee income they draw from China if its authors move toward fee-free domestic titles.
- capability If titles like Vita gain standing, Chinese editors would set the criteria for high-quality research and choose which papers appear, in Chen Fuyou's account.
Chen Fuyou, director of XinRui Journal Ranking, an independent evaluation website in Beijing, described the aim as control over selection. "This means China would get to define what is a high-quality paper and what is high-quality research, based on its own measures and selection processes. It would also get to decide what papers to publish," Chen said [6]. Ning Zhang, founder of TopEdit, a company in Gaithersburg, Maryland, that helps Chinese journals build a global presence, said: "What sets Vita apart is that it is a completely Chinese journal, launched by Chinese scientists and published by a Chinese publisher." [4]
Vita is one of several English-language journals launched in China in the past couple of years, and it has set its sights on rivalling the world's oldest and most influential titles [1]. They belong to the Journal Excellence Action Plan, which began in 2019 [2]. China is a global leader in scientific research, yet only a small portion of that research is published in Chinese-owned journals [5].
The state money comes on two tracks. Journals sorted into the plan's tiers receive annual funding for five years, and an English-language title in the top 'leading journals' tier can get up to 1.5 million yuan a year [15]. The publishers can receive grants of up to 10 million yuan per project over five years [18]. Zhang said the publishers are the bigger bet: "The government's goal is to help these companies to grow into major academic publishing groups, like Springer Nature. This is deemed a more efficient way than cultivating individual journals." [17]
Fee money flows the other way. If $909 million was nearly 30% of what publishers earned from article-processing charges in 2024, the global total was a little over $3 billion [1]. Li Dangsheng, Vita's co-editor-in-chief, told the state-run JiefangDaily in August that waiving fees lets the journal assess papers on quality and will help attract strong work from overseas authors [9].
James Butcher is a former publisher at Nature-branded journals and The Lancet who now runs the consultancy Journalology near Liverpool. He said Vita's model is "clearly going to be appealing" to authors, but that keeping it going will be hard because "publishing is expensive" [12]. Publishers that charge fees say the money pays for in-house editors, production staff, printing and servers [19]. Butcher also asked: "If there are 20% or 30% of papers coming from the United States, for example, is that something they would be happy to bankroll?" [13] Vita says it is committed to not charging fees to international researchers [14].
I think the evidence shows China building the means to challenge how journal prestige is assigned. It does not yet show the challenge working. The funding tiers exist, and the ownership model has moved from foreign partnership to domestic control [3][4]. Nature's report does not give submission counts, citation data, or the share of Chinese papers now going to domestic titles. The test I would apply is whether leading Chinese labs send Vita work they could have placed in the oldest journals, and whether foreign authors follow. On current evidence, the CAS fee cut already bears on where its scientists publish [11]. Vita's reputation is still being built from its first issues [7].
What to watch
- Whether Vita publishes submission and acceptance figures, including the share of papers from authors outside China.
- Whether Vita's funders keep waiving fees for foreign authors if overseas papers approach the 20% to 30% share Butcher described.
- Whether the Chinese Academy of Sciences extends its fee cut beyond the 30 journals, or other Chinese funders adopt similar rules.