Keeping a lid on open science | Nature Index

"Scientists in China have for years shown a willingness to embrace the principles of open science. The country hosted the major international open science conference, CODATA, in 1992, and again in 2006. China’s largest research organization, the Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS), and the major science funding agency, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), were also early signatories to the 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. Signatories agree that research should be made freely available online to all.

But, despite these signs, advocates of openness are frustrated by progress over the past decade. They say the country’s rigid publication regulations and information control, including the internet firewall which prevents researchers using some social media platforms to share information with international peers and the public, are partly to blame. Some also point to weak leadership and inadequate policies emanating from key government agencies such as the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) and the Ministry of Education.

While initiatives designed to promote open science exist, Wu Yishan, former deputy director general of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC) and an active science policy researcher, says 'the advances of open science initiatives are less than satisfactory'. 'We need strong leadership to promote this enterprise,' he says.

Open science, a loosely defined term, promotes practices such as open-access (OA) publishing, preprint archives and freely accessible institutional repositories where researchers deposit their research data for others to access. Judging research impact by more than just citations — for instance, by the level of social media sharing — has also become part of the movement."