Group seeks cooperation on global academic ethics

China will enhance global cooperation in upholding academic integrity and research ethics as well as promote open, fair and nondiscriminatory practices in scientific publishing to enrich the treasure trove of knowledge for mankind, officials and experts said.

Huai Jinpeng, executive vicepresident of the China Association for Science and Technology, said China is a latecomer to scientific publishing compared to Western nations, which have been printing professional scientific journals since the 18th century.

“China is catching up, thanks to open exchanges and cooperation with foreign publishers,” he said at the Third Forum for World Scientific, Technological and Medical Journals in Beijing on Monday.

“We hope to keep collaborating with international partners to jointly tackle emerging issues in academic integrity and ethics as scientific writing becomes more open and accessible to the public,” he said, adding that exploring new models for digitalised publishing and training publishing talent were also among the areas in which the nation was seeking cooperation.

Last year, China published 241 scientific journals, 28 more than in 2018, Huai said.

Fourteen journals ranked among the top 10% in turns of citation impact for their respective fields, and 10 were in the top 5%, he said.

This growth was fuelled by China’s fast-growing scientific workforce, which bloomed to over 4.19 million full-time scientists in 2018, more than six times the number in 1991, Huai said.

By the end of this year, about 10% of China’s population is estimated to hold a science degree, 3.8 percentage points higher than in 2015, he added.

But China was still significantly behind other publishing powerhouses such as the United States, United Kingdom and Netherlands, he added.