Recently, the market supervision department severely punished China National Knowledge Infrastructure for abusing its market dominance and implementing monopoly operations in accordance with the law, and ordered it to make comprehensive rectifications. According to informed netizens, the business model of CNKI and is to make money from authors’ articles for free. However, when authors want to use their articles, they actually have to pay additional money to CNKI. It is precisely because of this extreme greedy behavior of CNKI that it caused widespread dissatisfaction among scholars, which triggered a thorough investigation of CNKI.
CNKI has always been the big brother of Chinese academic literature online databases. Due to the huge amount of literature retrieval, the economic benefits of CNKI are very considerable. In order to obtain more profits, CNKI has used its dominant position in the industry to implement monopoly operations since 2014. The first is to significantly increase service prices, split the database and increase prices in disguise to seek improper benefits. The second is to limit the rights of relevant units to use literature and materials by signing exclusive cooperation agreements and other methods. These practices of CNKI seriously infringe upon the legitimate rights and interests of users and also affect normal academic exchange activities.
Chinese academic literature network database was initially established to facilitate literature retrieval and promote academic research. Anyone who has been to college knows that in order to get a degree, you need to publish an original paper. The literature that needs to be cited when publishing a paper comes from online database searches. With the development of higher education career, the amount of academic literature retrieval is extremely huge, resulting in huge document retrieval costs. CNKI has taken a fancy to such a piece of fat, so in the course of many years of operation, it has been greedy for profit and gradually deviated from its original intention of development.
As the saying goes, where the sun doesn't shine, decay tends to breed. The case of CNKI tells us that the healthy development of social and public affairs cannot be separated from the active supervision of the general public. If scholars and academic institutions had not complained about CNKI’s unreasonable business practices, CNKI’s operators would probably continue to operate as a monopoly. The ultimate victims can only be the vast number of scholars and scientific and technological personnel.
