In Depth: How China’s Biggest Academic Library Got Shrouded in Copyright Disputes

At the center of the CNKI’s profit machine are its comprehensive Chinese-language databases, which include academic journals, graduate and doctoral dissertations, full text newspapers, working papers from conferences and symposiums, among other resources.

At 89, Zhao Dexin should have been enjoying his retirement, after a successful career as an economic historian.

But, for the past three years, Zhao had waged a legal battle against the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), a digital library, after discovering that the latter had acquired over 100 of his research papers without his consent.

It was a lopsided fight, with the odds against Zhao.

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