China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), China’s biggest platform for sharing academic papers and theses, was slapped with a fine of 87.6 million yuan (US$12.9m) for monopoly on December 26, 2022, equal to 5 percent of CNKI’s domestic sales revenue in 2021.
China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said it has been investigating CNKI since May 2022. The SAMR gathered overwhelming evidence of CNKI using its market dominance to arbitrarily increase the price and restrict users’ sharing of knowledge to third parties, which impaired users’ rights and interests and obstructed academic exchanges and innovations.
CNKI released measures for rectification the same day, including cutting actual service prices by over 30 percent within three years, setting up a pricing administration system, stopping compulsory exclusive agreements with sharers, mainly journals and universities, expanding the range of free services and paying more attention to protecting author copyrights.
CNKI has come under fierce public fire since December 2021 when Zhao Dexin, a retired professor at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan sued CNKI for charging people over the use of more than 100 of his papers without his permission.
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