The construction of China’s academic ecosystem currently faces unprecedented severe challenges. Academic misconduct and fragmented governance systems are intertwined, seriously hindering the healthy development of the academic community and becoming a key obstacle to achieving the strategic goal of building world-class scientific journals in China. However, university academic journals, as the primary gateway and important gatekeepers for publishing and disseminating academic achievements, require clearer recognition and systematic explanation of their unique functional role and potential value in the collaborative governance system addressing academic misconduct. On one hand, the concealment and complexity of academic misconduct impose higher requirements on the identification and handling capabilities of journals; on the other hand, the rights and responsibilities boundaries of journals as governance subjects are not clearly defined, making it difficult to fully leverage their hub role in the collaborative governance system. Additionally, rapid technological advancement and dynamic balance of ethical values present additional governance challenges, urgently requiring more systematic solutions from both theoretical and practical perspectives. This study, based on the theory of collaborative governance as its theoretical foundation and analytical framework, adopts in-depth qualitative research methods to conduct systematic interviews and surveys with 30 representative university academic journals across China. Through multi-dimensional and multi-level empirical data collection the study provides a solid empirical foundation. By using the three-level coding technique of grounded theory to deeply analyze the interview data, this paper develops an innovative four-dimensional collaborative governance theoretical model mediated by university academic journals for addressing academic misconduct. The model comprehensively and systematically reveals the functional positioning, action mechanisms, and intrinsic logic of university academic journals within the collaborative governance network of academic misconduct from four key dimensions: subject collaboration, institutional adjustment, technological governance, and cultural embedding, offering novel theoretical insights into academic governance complexity. The findings demonstrate that these four governance dimensions form an interconnected network of mutual support and dynamic coupling, creating a cohesive governance system. University academic journals, as key nodes connecting various stakeholders in the academic community, need to fully leverage their hub role by: fostering the formation of a responsibility community with multi-stakeholder collaborating in the subject collaboration dimension, establishing cross-departmental and cross-sectoral collaboration mechanisms; promoting the value reconstruction and dynamic adjustment of academic norms in the institutional adjustment dimension, thereby achieving the timeliness of the rules system; achieving the organic balance of tool rationality and value rationality in the technological governance dimension, while ensuring the unity of technology application and ethical values; and guiding the internalization and evolution of academic integrity values in the cultural embedding dimension, thus cultivating a healthy and upward academic cultural atmosphere.