The OpenAIRE Graph has expanded its global coverage with the integration of more than 1 million records from PubScholar, the public academic resource platform developed by the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NSLC) and its partners.
Released as part of OpenAIRE Graph version 11.3.0 on 4 August 2026, the integration makes PubScholar content discoverable within a wider network of interconnected scholarly information. It also marks an important step in the collaboration between OpenAIRE and NSLC, launched in 2024 to strengthen interoperability and the exchange of research information between Europe and China.
From collaboration to connection
Launched in 2023, PubScholar provides discovery and access to scholarly resources from China and around the world, including publications, research data, patents, preprints and books. The platform is led by NSLC together with the Computer Network Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and China Science Publishing & Media.
Its integration into the OpenAIRE Graph builds directly on the three-year collaboration established between OpenAIRE and NSLC in 2024. From the outset, a key objective has been to improve interoperability between PubScholar and the Graph through metadata exchange, common practices, organisation curation and technical development.
Bringing PubScholar into the Graph puts this work into practice: metadata can now move beyond individual infrastructures and become part of a broader, interconnected research information ecosystem.
Bringing PubScholar into the Graph
With the integration, PubScholar content becomes part of the wider OpenAIRE Graph ecosystem, where it benefits from OpenAIRE’s metadata processing and linking workflows. Records are cleaned, enriched and, where sufficient metadata is available, deduplicated and connected with other research entities across the Graph.
This means PubScholar content can be discovered alongside research information collected from repositories, journals, aggregators and other scholarly infrastructures worldwide.
Importantly, these records do not sit in isolation. The Graph connects research products with entities such as datasets, software, researchers, organisations, projects and funders, helping provide more context around how research is produced, funded and connected.
With version 11.4.0, the Graph contains around 389 million research products, making the addition of PubScholar part of an increasingly broad and interconnected view of global research.
Broadening the picture of global research
The significance of the integration goes beyond the number of records added. PubScholar brings further representation of scholarly information from the Chinese research ecosystem into an open international research graph, helping connect information that has traditionally been distributed across separate regional and national systems.
For researchers
This can support broader discovery across research ecosystems and make connections between related outputs, organisations and potential collaborators easier to identify.
For research institutions and infrastructures
Better-connected metadata can contribute to a more complete understanding of research activity while supporting interoperability across national and international systems.
For funders and policymakers
broader coverage can strengthen the evidence available for research monitoring and analysis across countries and disciplines.
Together, these connections support a wider goal: moving from simply making individual research outputs accessible towards making the relationships between research, people, organisations and funding easier to discover and understand.
Connecting research across regions
The integration also advances the wider ambition behind the OpenAIRE–NSLC collaboration: to make Open Science infrastructures more interoperable while improving the flow and reuse of scholarly information across borders.
For research communities in Europe, China and beyond, this means that outputs originating in different infrastructures can increasingly be explored within the same connected environment. Where persistent identifiers and sufficient metadata are available, records can also be linked to researcher identities such as ORCID and to related research entities elsewhere in the scholarly ecosystem.
In this way, the value of the integration is not simply greater coverage, but greater context: making it easier to understand how individual research outputs relate to the wider landscape in which they were created.
What comes next
The PubScholar integration is one step in the ongoing collaboration between OpenAIRE and NSLC. Work will continue around interoperability, metadata practices, data exchange and the development of better-connected Open Science infrastructure.
As scholarly information continues to span national and disciplinary boundaries, these connections provide a foundation for research to be more discoverable, reusable and understood across research communities worldwide.
Explore the OpenAIRE Graph in OpenAIRE EXPLORE and discover PubScholar records alongside research information from sources around the world here.
