The China Quarterly journal will publish hundreds of articles on Chinese democracy that were censored last week, causing outrage in the academic community.

The respected journal's publisher CUP "intends to repost immediately the articles removed from its website in China," the editor Tim Pringle said in a statement on Twitter.

Pringle added that the decision to remove the articles had been taken by the CUP "without the consent of The China Quarterly".

CUP, the world's oldest publishing house, came under intense international pressure on Friday after it confirmed that it had complied with "instruction from a Chinese import agency to block individual articles".

The company argued it had done so in order "to ensure that other academic and educational materials we publish remain available to researchers and educators in this market".

However, CUP also said it was "troubled by the recent increase in requests of this nature" and that it was planning to address the issue in meetings with Chinese officials at the Beijing Book Fair later this week.

According to Pringle, access to 315 articles and reviews had been blocked, including many about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and the Chinese democracy movement.

The censorship of the digital version of a respected scholarly journal outraged international academics, who saw it as a curb on academic freedom and an attempt to censor history.

Christopher Balding, economics professor at Peking University in Shenzhen, China, had swiftly launched a Change.org petition calling on the CUP to "refuse the censorship request".

Greg Distelhorst, professor of global economics and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, congratulated CUP on Twitter for its decision on Monday.

"Thank you to scholars, journalists, and concerned individuals who spoke up and amplified the message," he wrote.