From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 17:52:03 +0100

On May 15, 2014 both the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the
National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) announced new open
access policies.

Both funders’ policies require that all papers resulting from funded
projects must be deposited in online repositories and made publicly
accessible within 12 months of publication — a model pioneered by the
US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008, when it introduced its
influential Public Access Policy.

As a result of the new Chinese policies there will be a significant
increase in the number of research papers freely available, not least
because it comes at a time when the number of papers published by
Chinese researchers is growing rapidly. In reporting news of the
policies, Nature indicated that Chinese research output has grown from
48,000 articles in 2003, or 5.6% of the global total, to more than
186,000 articles in 2012, or 13.9%.

Of the latter figure, more than 100,000 papers, or 55.2% of Chinese
output, involved some funding from the NSFC.

A Q&A conducted by email with Prof. Yonghe Zheng, Deputy Director
General of the Bureau of Policy, NSFC can be viewed here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/the-open-access-interviews-deputy.htmlk