Bridging Continents Through Open Science: Reflections from China’s ZGC Forum

What's at Stake: A Multipolar Open Science Landscape

Open Science is playing an increasingly important role in enabling global scientific collaboration. As science policy gains strategic weight in international relations, initiatives like China's International Cooperation in Open Science, launched at the 2024 G20 Summit[1], reflect a growing ambition to contribute to a more inclusive and sovereign global approach to openness. With investments in regional capacity-building, national cloud platforms, and coordinated infrastructure development, China is shaping its own model of Open Science, aligned with broader efforts to foster international cooperation.

Why It Matters: From Bilateral Engagement to Global Dialogue

In March 2025, I joined over 150 delegations from 80+ countries at the Zhongguancun Forum (ZGCForum) in Beijing. The event, themed "New Productive Forces and Global Science and Technology Cooperation," reflected the country's ambition to position itself as a scientific convener.

Beyond exhibitions of cutting-edge technology, the Forum gave OpenAIRE a valuable opportunity to meet with the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASNSL), our collaborator since 2023. and discuss practical steps toward interoperability, metadata sharing, and governance collaboration.

PubScholar, CASNSL's flagship platform, serves as China's parallel to OpenAIRE's Graph (REF) and Explore services (REF). With a focus on aggregating scholarly metadata, enabling discovery, and supporting interoperability, PubScholar reflects a shared vision for building open, federated infrastructures. It offers a strong foundation for strategic, peer-level collaboration between China and Europe in shaping the global layer of Open Science.

Reflections from the Panel: A Global System, A Shared Responsibility

The Open Science International Forum session brought together top-level speakers from across China's science and education leadership, UNESCO, the African Union, and South Africa's National Research Foundation. I joined colleagues from CASNSL, Japan, and representatives from the three major commercial publishers, Springer, Wiley, and Elsevier, to reflect on how global Open Science can move from vision to implementation. Their strong presence in China, through co-publishing agreements, regional offices, and close ties with national institutions, really stood out to me. It is clear they play a major role in shaping how research is communicated. While it is encouraging to see them engaged in Open Science conversations, I couldn't help but feel that there is still a lot of work ahead to ensure that the broader research community, particularly public institutions, researchers, and open infrastructures, takes the lead in setting the agenda.

Here are the key takeaways from my contribution:

• Interoperability must respect diversity. National sovereignty over data and infrastructures is a reality. But silos cannot be the outcome. We must design shared technical and legal interfaces, metadata standards, APIs, governance models, that connect systems without forcing convergence.
  
  
• Inclusivity is not optional. Many researchers, particularly early-career scientists and those in the Global South, remain excluded from global science. Multilingual tools, targeted capacity-building, and inclusive governance are essential to give all voices a place at the table.
  
  
• Openness is more than access. It's about making knowledge usable, enriched metadata, machine-readability, AI translation, and platforms that empower human expertise, not replace it. Open infrastructures must guide these technologies ethically and transparently.
  
  
• Culture and trust matter. Open Science is not a purely technical exercise. It's a cultural shift. Building trust across regions, through mobility schemes, is just as vital as building interoperable systems.
  
  

In short, Open Science is not just a system, it is a community. If we want a global model that works, we must connect infrastructures, empower people, and bridge cultures through shared purpose.

What's Ahead: OpenAIRE's Role

OpenAIRE has been a steady builder of federated, open infrastructures in Europe. As we expand international engagement, from deepening ties with CASNSL in China to exploring partnerships in other regions, we are doing so not to export a model, but to co-develop a global one.

Our goal is to shape the global layer of Open Science: not centralized, but federated, inclusive, and based on trust.

Last but not least, I would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to the team at the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for their generous hospitality and for making me feel truly at home during my visit. Their openness, professionalism, and enthusiasm for collaboration left a lasting impression. I'm very much looking forward to continuing our dialogue and building meaningful, long-term cooperation between our communities.

[1] https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202411/22/WS673fc463a310f1265a1cef28.html