學術期刊資料庫的反壟斷監管

The Antitrust Regulation of Academic Journal Databases

大型學術期刊資料庫通過電子文獻的一站式交付，有效滿足了全社會激增的版權付費使用需求，推動了知識資源的傳播共用與再利用增值。但與此同時，頭部資料庫服務商尋購了海量的文獻版權資源，實質性地鎖定了下游用戶並擁有了收取壟斷價格的能力，引發了知識服務市場壟斷的質疑。然而，我國反壟斷監管機構表現出了極高的容忍度，未曾挑戰大型資料庫連年走高的訂閱使用費要價，頻頻被指反壟斷執法缺位。對此，監管者一方面需要採取一類更為直觀的“不公平高價”認定標準，懲處大型資料庫潛在的濫用支配地位行為；另一方面則應積極轉向競爭導向型的監管思路，有序引導學術資料庫市場形成競爭。通過限制優勢資料庫獲取獨佔性版權許可、建設替代性公共學術資料庫平臺、扶持聚合式網路學術搜尋引擎等措施，能夠以較低成本維持學術資料庫開放競爭的市場結構，消除知識服務市場被壟斷的顧慮。

The academic journal databases effectively promote the knowledge’s dissemination, sharing and reuse, through delivering massive journal documents. Meanwhile, the leading databases have obtained an extremely high market share by aggregating huge journal paper’s copyright licenses, which substantially locked down the downstream users and possessed the ability to charge a monopolized price. Up to now, Chinese Antitrust Agencies have not challenged the subscription fees charged by them, which was criticized for lacking of antitrust enforcement. Thus, the agencies should not only adopt a more intuitive “unfairly high price” identification standard, but also turn to a regulatory framework to promote competition. Through restricting their aggregation of exclusive copyright licenses, building alternative public academic databases and supporting opening academic search engines, the academic journal market might maintain a limited but beneficial competition, and eliminate concerns about monopoly in the knowledge service market.