According to a report from news portal thepaper.cn, there are some 4,000 items tagged as "doctoral dissertations" for sale on kongfz.com, which come from dozens of elite Chinese universities including Tsinghua University, Peking University and Fudan University.
据新闻门户网站《澎湃新闻》报道，孔夫子旧书网上出售的博士论文多达4000多篇，这些论文的作者大多来自清华大学、北京大学、复旦大学等我国10多所知名院校。
The dissertations are priced from 5 - 1,000 yuan by different sellers on the website.
网站上不同卖家出售的论文价格为5-1000元不等。
"The website removed some works in October 2016 after our complaints. But now they are selling them again," Zhang Ming (pseudonym), who has a doctorate from Tsinghua University, was quoted by thepaper.cn as saying last Wednesday.
上周三，清华大学博士毕业生张明（化名）向《澎湃新闻》透露：“2016年10月份受到投诉之后，该网站下架了部分论文，但现在他们又开始卖了。”
Many of the graduates, who said their dissertations are being sold without consent, added that the website is infringing their intellectual property rights and causing psychological and economic damages, said the thepaper.cn report.
据《澎湃新闻》报道，论文作者称，网站未经他们的同意就进行售卖，这侵犯了他们的知识产权，给他们造成了心理创伤和经济损失。

"We don't want our dissertations to be spread widely before our original points of view are published in academic journals or books, as there's no way to guarantee other people will not copy these ideas," Zhang added.
张明表示：“在原创观点于学术期刊发表或以专著形式出版之前，我们不愿意让自己的论文大范围传播，那样可能导致他人的抄袭。”
"When the author hands in the dissertation to university faculties for reviews, or the graduate donates the copies to the libraries or gifts these copies to friends, the writers have already executed their publication rights", Yao Huanqing, a professor from the Law School of the Renmin University of China, told the Global Times.
来自中国人民大学法学院的姚欢庆教授在接受《环球时报》采访时表示：“在将论文交给学校评审或捐赠给图书馆、或送给朋友时，作者就已经在行使他们的出版权了。”
"If the sellers on the kongfz.com got these copies from the above mentioned sources, then the copies cannot be considered as pirated."
“如果孔夫子旧书网通过上述途径得到了论文，那么这些论文就不为作者个人所有了。”
Unless the authors can prove that these copies are pirated, they cannot demand the shop owners to stop selling the copies, and the sellers could set the price according to their discretion, Yao said, adding that the owners do not have a duty to explain how they got these copies either.
姚欢庆教授称，除非作者可以证明论文是其个人所有，否则他们无权要求网站店主下架论文，店主就有权对论文进行定价，也无需解释他们是如何获得这些论文的。