01/21/2020

Global Science, China’s Rise and European Anxiety

China’s skyrocketing investment in science is causing real anxiety for some

Last week, I was fortunate to be able to attend the Academic Publishing in Europe conference. Conference director Arnoud de Kemp and his colleagues served up a very strong program. 

I decided to attend the conference because I wanted to understand European scholarly communication policy issues more deeply. Being in Berlin, a crossroads city whose history overwhelmed me, it is clear to me that while so many strive to create a global system for science and scientific publishing, history is still alive and geopolitics still matters. In particular, while some talk about global science, China’s skyrocketing investment in its scientific sector is causing real anxiety for Europe.

Global Science
The conference opened with a brief welcome by Günter Ziegler, the president of the Freie Universität Berlin. In it, Ziegler derided the the Association of American Publishers’ December letter, which opposed the leaked Trump Administration plan to remove embargoes from the open access mandates on articles resulting from federally funded research. 

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.