To Embrace Open Science More Closely

Main Text

At the Extraordinary G20 Leaders' Summit on COVID-19 on March 26, 2020, China launched an online knowledge center for the prevention and control of novel coronavirus pneumonia, a center open to all countries. Since the outbreak of coronavirus disease, China has been sharing knowledge about disease prevention and control with the World Health Organization and governments throughout the world.

It was on March 19, 2020, only 1 week before the Summit, that the China Association for Science and Technology released a program to fund studies concerning global trends in Open Access and the development approach of Open Access in China. In addition to its interest in Open Access, China encourages the cultivation of world-class academic journals and active participation in the academic publishing industry for the promotion of scholarly communication.

Open Access is a set of principles and a range of practices to ensure free, unrestricted online access to research outputs. It is one aspect of the broader concept of Open Science, which represents a new approach to the scientific process based on cooperative work and new ways of diffusing knowledge by using digital technologies and new collaborative tools.

Open Science, as a research accelerator,¹ will promote the development of science and technology in China. As one of the emerging countries in the world, China is becoming more and more active in the scientific community and collaborations. The total number of full-time equivalent researchers engaged in science and technology in China was estimated to be about 4.19 million in 2018, ranking number one in the world.² In 2019, China enrolled 917,000 postgraduate students, with the total number of postgraduate students at school increasing to 2.864 million.³ All these R&D personnel and students will greatly benefit from Open Access to publications, open research data, open source software, open collaboration, open peer review, open notebooks, and open educational resources.

Open Science can also benefit China's transition to an innovation-based economy. As the second largest economy in the world since 2010, China's GDP increased to 99.09 trillion RMB in 2019.³ According to the 2019 Bloomberg innovation index, China ranked 16^th of the world's most innovative countries, moving from 19^th in 2018. In recent 10 years, China has been pursuing quality of economic growth over speed, underpinning its ongoing transition toward more innovation-driven growth. Traditionally, there has long been a great disconnection between research-driven universities/institutions and application-driven companies. By increasing the research capacity and visibility, facilitating rapid access to novel data and software resources, and creating new opportunities to interact with and contribute to the ongoing communal projects, Open Science may make research collaboration easier for researchers to bond with one another, and especially strengthen the links between universities/institutions and companies.⁴

Background

Open Science is a movement aiming to remove the barriers to sharing any kind of research outputs, resources, methods or tools, at any stage of the research process. Open Science embodies a number of aspects, the core of which is Open Access, open data, open source, open access monographs, open access references, and open standards that offer unfettered dissemination of scientific discourse⁵ (Supplemental Information).