''Sino-Platonic Papers'' is a scholarly

monographic series Monographic series (alternatively, monographs in series) are scholarly and scientific books released in successive volumes, each of which is structured like a separate book or scholarly monograph. Semantics In general books that are released ser ...

published by the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

. The chief focus of the series is on the intercultural relations of China and

Central Asia Central Asia is a region of Asia consisting of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The countries as a group are also colloquially referred to as the "-stans" as all have names ending with the Persian language, Pers ...

with other peoples. The journal was established in 1986 by

Victor H. Mair Victor Henry Mair (; born March 25, 1943) is an American Sinology, sinologist currently serving as a professor of Chinese language, Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania. Among other accomplishments, Mair has edited the standard ''Columbia His ...

, to publish and encourage "unconventional or controversial" research by "younger, not yet well established, scholars and independent authors". Issues 1 (November 1986) through 170 (February 2006) were published in traditional printed format, but beginning with issue 171 (June 2006), ''Sino-Platonic Papers'' has been published electronically only. All new issues, and old ones that are no longer in print, are provided free in

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

format, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. The

Warring States The Warring States period in Chinese history (221 BC) comprises the final two and a half centuries of the Zhou dynasty (256 BC), which were characterized by frequent warfare, bureaucratic and military reforms, and struggles for gre ...

Project, at the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) is a public land-grant research university in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system and was founded in 1863 as the ...

, called changing this journal's publication format to

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

"an explicit challenge to the gatekeepers whose chief role is to keep the lid on."Sinological Journals: Sino-Platonic Papers
, Warring States Project, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

References

External links

* Chinese studies journals Creative Commons Attribution-licensed journals Academic journals established in 1986 Multilingual journals Monographic series Open access journals {{area-journal-stub