Submission up to now, although quite a few short pieces and book reviews have been published, the situation with my properly serious academic papers is still rather worrying. The key, I suppose, is that I have simply not been conscientious enough; I only became energetically “sending many manuscripts to many journals” at a few particular points in time, and for most of the time I basically left things to fend for themselves.
But two of my papers were both rejected after being accepted because of the issue of page charges, and this is a situation worth explaining. Perhaps you would guess that I refused to pay the page charges out of pride, stubbornness, or the like, and was therefore rejected; but the truth is much more complicated. In fact, I support “page charges”; indeed, in some circumstances I would rather pay page charges than receive an honorarium.
Before explaining my understanding of page charges, let me first review these two experiences of rejection. Those not interested in this can jump directly to the latter half.
The first time was among my earliest submissions. At the time I was looking through the list of core journals while organizing my articles, and among them there was one piece on the Olympics. I had originally intended to submit it as an essay to a journal like Sociologist’s Tea House, but I happened to catch sight of Guide to Sports Culture in the core journal list, and with a try-it-and-see mentality I sent it there. As a result, this was the first submission of mine to receive an acceptance notice as a “paper.”
Now then, this 6,000-character paper was to be charged 2,000 yuan in page fees—what was I to do? I went to the post office the very next day and remitted the money. Of course, in fact I also had a bit of the idea of seeking a good-luck opening for my first paper, I suppose. In addition, I happened to be going to eat a group-buy deal across from the post office the next day, so the money was remitted just like that. But after remitting it, when I wrote back and so on, there was no further news. From the day I remitted the money on March 24, 2012, past the remittance deadline of April 7, and all the way into mid-April, I did not receive a single word in reply. At the same time, I thought again about the earlier notice informing me of acceptance and requesting revisions, and the more I looked at it, the more off it seemed. In addition to saying that it had been accepted, that notice also told me: “Upon plagiarism-check retrieval, the copy ratio of your article is 5.6%, with 348 overlapping characters. When revising, please be sure to delete or annotate in detail the paragraphs highlighted in red in the attachment, especially any improper copied text or references. Please avoid self-citation as much as possible.” But when I glanced at the “paragraphs highlighted in red,” I found that all the highlighted portions were inside quotation marks; they were my quotations. And the duplicated passages it had found were nothing more than the fact that someone else and I had quoted the same passages from the same book, while the contexts before and after were completely different—there could not possibly be any suspicion of plagiarism. The reason for the highlighting could at most have been that my method of annotation was not recognized by their computer program. But why was such a fact, which anyone could see at a glance, simply sent to me and made into a revision request? Besides, if an article really had a plagiarism problem, how could it have been so easily accepted in the first place? And when I connected this with the emails I had sent asking to confirm the remittance and inquiring about formatting revisions, all of which only received the mailbox’s “automatic reply,” I came to a conclusion: this journal had only “robots.” So in mid-April I ran to the post office and got the remittance back—because it had not yet been withdrawn there—and I emailed them to say that I was unwilling to submit to a journal that had only robots. The only thing somewhat reassuring was that this time there was finally a reply to the email. Apparently the editors had previously gone off together to hold a meeting (going into some remote mountain wilderness with no internet to hold a meeting for more than half a month—how hard that must have been), and then one editor angrily scolded me, saying he had never seen anyone like me, and that my calling them robots was an insult to them. But using a computer program to determine that I had plagiarized is not called insulting me? Going off to hold meetings and leaving submitters hanging without a word is not called insulting them? Of course, the final result was that the first acceptance also became the first rejection.
The second encounter with page charges was more recent. This time, I submitted “Is Heidegger a Technological Pessimist?” to the Journal of Northeastern University (Social Science Edition). It must be pointed out that, overall, this submission experience was rather pleasant. The journal had an online submission platform which, though crude, was fairly usable, and unlike many other online submission platforms I have used, here I could indeed clearly see the review progress and review comments. After the acceptance was finally confirmed, the journal editor also had much email contact with me, raising various revision suggestions. Although many of those suggestions seemed to stem from misunderstandings due to his not really understanding Heidegger or my intention in this paper, what was commendable was that these revision suggestions could be fully discussed with me and my explanations accepted.
The problem was that, until the very end of the whole process—until I had already mailed back the signed copyright transfer agreement as requested, and he had already formatted the paper for me—he only then told me that I needed to pay an 800-yuan page charge. (Afterward he explained that they had to wait until the layout was finished before determining how much to collect, but I think that informing me early on that a page charge would be required, along with roughly how it would be calculated, was entirely something they could and should have done.)
The final result was that I was unwilling to pay the page charge, and it ended in rejection.
But what is 800 yuan in page charges? Previously, for a 6,000-character essayistic piece that I might as well have published or not published, I had without a word remitted 2,000 yuan in page charges; this time, for a 9,000-character and rather important article, they only charged me 800 yuan—what was there for me to be dissatisfied about?
The key point lies in the “copyright transfer agreement” I had already signed and mailed.
The proposal I made was this: first, you symbolically give me an honorarium, say 100 yuan, and I am willing to pay a “review fee” or some other kind of fee, say 1,000 yuan, but it cannot be called a “page charge”; second, I pay the page charge, but the copyright transfer agreement signed earlier should be invalidated or signed anew; third, I do not pay the page charge, and you either publish it or reject it. Of course, the editor of that journal was also quite stubborn and could not accept my proposal, so they could only reject it.
Why did I put forward such demands? This has to do with my understanding of page charges:
Why do I support the existence of page charges? First, this is a market law. Especially in the Chinese context, scholars’ demand for journal space far exceeds journals’ demand for papers. Although one could say that good papers are still very rare, I do not want to inflate myself here. In any case, I do not think my own papers are so good that they ought not to be published. More importantly, I also have not treated submission with any particular seriousness. As long as journals remain serious and rigorous in treating papers, charging for survival is nothing to criticize.
On the other hand, journals charging page fees are not only unassailable, but also have positive significance, because nowadays most journals simply cannot make money by selling the journal itself. Those journals that do not charge page fees are either very large to begin with or must have sufficiently strong backing. And an operating model supported by allocations from higher-level authorities is, in my view, no more dignified than a survival model that charges page fees. If a journal can be self-supporting through page charges, its operation may well become freer and more autonomous.
Of course, the reason why academic journal “pages” in China are “in short supply” is that the pathological incentive mechanism of China’s present academic world has caused this. If this academic system is eventually improved and the manic environment of paper publication is curbed, then perhaps page charges should no longer, and need no longer, be collected? I think that even in such an environment, page charges would still be worth having.
In my view, charging page fees means that the publishing model is no longer one in which the journal buys articles from authors in order to issue the journal, but rather one in which authors pay to use journal pages in order to publish articles, while the journal has already received its profit before the journal is printed and issued, rather than only benefiting after the journal is sold. The significance of this new publishing mechanism is that the publisher does not need to sell the journal at all!
What does this mean? It means that the journal can in fact be distributed for free, or only the printing cost can be charged, or simply—as in the so-called OA publishing model abroad—there is no need to publish a paper version at all, and all papers can simply be shared online for free. Because of the free public availability of papers, journals cannot profit after distribution (except through donations), but page charges allow journals still to make a profit. And authors are still willing to pay for free publication, because in the age of information explosion, if you merely put your paper on your own blog and distribute it for free, that cannot be compared with finding an authoritative, strictly peer-reviewed high-quality channel to distribute it for free. And such a mode of distribution can still serve the function of academic evaluation.
When I was exchanging views with the editor of the Journal of Northeastern University, he complained to me that in the face of large databases such as CNKI, small journals like theirs had no bargaining power at all, and the copyright usage fees they received from those databases were extremely small—on average, less than one yuan per paper per year—so they all settled with authors in a one-time payment of honoraria. But he had completely failed to understand what I meant. My question was: since journals cannot make much money from copyright anyway, one yuan a year is practically negligible in the face of an 800-yuan page charge, right? And I was entirely willing to pay a page charge of more than 1,000 yuan—equivalent to giving you 200 extra years’ worth of copyright usage fees, if you like—so why must you still require me to sign a copyright transfer agreement? Just to earn that extra one yuan a year, do you have to make me transfer the copyright in full?
Besides, if a journal wants to profit from databases such as CNKI, it probably does not need complete copyright anyway—in the copyright transfer agreement it says: “Without your journal’s consent, no part of this article may be reprinted or used in any form.” What CNKI obtains from journals is probably merely a non-exclusive right of reprinting, and not exclusive copyright at all; otherwise the same paper could not appear simultaneously in multiple paper databases, could it? Therefore, I at least demand that this all-in-one, blanket copyright transfer be rewritten, or at the very least that I be allowed to retain certain forms of reprint rights myself. This would not affect the journal’s income by even one yuan.
If journals sustain themselves through page charges and gain renown by providing excellent discriminating judgment, then publishing articles through an excellent journal means having passed strict peer review. Even papers that are ultimately made freely available can still serve as a reference for measuring an author’s academic ability; therefore authors and the providers of research funding will also be willing to pay page charges, and papers with open copyright can further stimulate academic exchange and promote scholarly development. This would be a win-win-win situation for authors, journals, and the academic community.
But my request never received a reply again. I think this was because the journal fundamentally did not understand my stubbornness—of course they would judge me to be a stubborn person, but they did not understand just what it was I was being stubborn about. It was precisely because I support the new publishing model opened up by page charges that I wanted to be so exacting about this matter. At that time, Guide to Sports Culture did not require me to sign a copyright transfer agreement, but since the Journal of Northeastern University was asking me in all seriousness to sell the complete copyright, then I too had to take the matter seriously.
My history and my philosophy are consistent. I use my life to interpret my theory. These two experiences of rejection—especially the second—though they ultimately accomplished nothing, were indeed meaningful.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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