Academic freedom | Springer Nature blocks access to articles in China

Academic publisher Springer Nature says it has blocked access to articles within China to comply with demands from the Chinese government.

The company said yesterday about 1 percent of its content available online in global markets has been blocked in compliance with “local distribution laws.”

The articles related to topics such as Taiwan, Tiananmen Square and Tibet considered sensitive by the ruling Communist Party. They can only be viewed with a virtual private network allowing users to skirt China’s tight internet censorship regime, known as the Great Firewall.

The newspaper Financial Times reported that at least 1,000 articles were blocked.

The decision by Springer – which owns Nature magazine and Palgrave Macmillan books, and produces periodicals such as Scientific American – prompted anger from academics, FT reports.

Two months after Cambridge University Press acceded to similar pressures from Beijing, before reversing course after an intense backlash against its surrender of academic freedom.

In August, academic publisher Cambridge University Press restored more than 300 politically sensitive articles that had been removed from the publisher’s website in China at the behest of authorities.

“It’s a symbol of how unprepared we are in the west for China’s influence expanding outwards,” said Jonathan Sullivan, director of the University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute and author of one of the censored articles told FT.

“It’s about how we perceive our relationship with China and how much we value principles versus the instrumental benefits of pleasing the authorities in China.”

Springer said in a statement that it had blocked access to “a small percentage of our content [less than 1 per cent]” in mainland China but that the articles remained available elsewhere. It said it was obliged to comply with “local distribution laws”, which are enforced by its partner, the state-owned China National Publications Import & Export Corporation.

Springer added that the Chinese censorship would have “no influence from an editorial perspective on the content we publish” and that it remained “committed to safeguarding the integrity of the scientific record”. MDT/Agencies