Institute For The Future

Will Open Science Make It Even Harder to Build Science Communities in China?

A pair of reports last week suggest that China's science community, while thriving, still has a long way to go before it becomes the kind of knowledge-circulating system needed to support world-class technical innovation.

 

First as Lan Xue argues in Nature, the aspiration of Chinese scientists to publish in internationally-recognized journals means that their research results do not circulate freely amongst their peers. In a sense, much of the output of Chinese science is "being published in a language that few researchers in China understand and at prices that few of them can afford".

 

Second, domestic conferences don't seem to be picking up where written discourse is disconnecting. A survey of 380 scholars conducted last year by Chen Shijun from the Scientific and Social Research Centre at Tianjin University found that only 2 in 5 were satisfied with the quality of the gatherings. The report in SciDev.net lists the many problems with organization, presenter selection, and paucity of real debate and discussion.

 

One has to wonder how China is going to solve some of these problems, especially as the scientific world seems to be moving rapidly towards a community model characterized by highly internationalized, English-centric web publishing and intensely collaborative workshops and conferences. If these reports are to be taken at face value, it seems that young Chinese researchers are not being adequately prepared or exposed to either of these key elements. On the other hand, though, given China's size and the potential for creating semi-independent national science networks large enough to flourish without constant outside stimulation, Chinese science has the potential to go its own fruitful way. In doing so, it might avoid some of the potential downsides of web-enabled science, such as the narrowing of scholarship described in James Evans' recent study of electronic publication. His takeaway: "as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship."