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Over the next few weeks, people around the world will be celebrating Chinese New Year and the transition to the year of the Ox. In the spirit of celebrating China, we wanted to reflect on the past year of Chinese research published with F1000Research, before exploring the current landscape for open research in China.

Snapshot of F1000Research from China in 2020

From December 2019 to February 2021, F1000Research has received 102 submissions from China, an increase of 275% on submissions from 2019. Of course, research submissions from around the world spiked this year with a demand for fast action and rapid publication in a time of COVID-19, but it is encouraging to see diversity in the topics covered and article types published in 2020.

With this brief snapshot of our ‘Top 3 from 2020’, I hope to highlight just some of the research published from China over the past year, as well as demonstrate the variety of research areas covered.

1 – Tracking and forecasting milepost moments of the epidemic in the early-outbreak: framework and applications to COVID-19

The first Research Article highlighted focuses on COVID-19-related research as Huiwen Wang, Yanwen Zhang, Shan Lu and Shanshan Wang (all from institutions in Beijing, China) propose a framework for forecasting an unknown infectious disease during early stages of an outbreak.

After defining key iconic indicators for the initial stage of the pandemic, the team developed a tracking and forecasting framework which was later applied to publicly available data from mainland China. The team concluded that the framework could be effectively applied to emerging or future COVID-19 outbreaks, as well as potential outbreaks of unknown infectious diseases. 

“I look forward to seeing this being applied to data from other regions/countries, and results discussed,” concluded peer reviewer, Paula Brito (University of Porto & LIAAD – INESC TEC, Portugal).

Should a framework like this be applied to future outbreaks, there is a potential for the predictions to be instrumental in decision support for epidemic control and intervention, the team argues. However, the authors close their discussion calling for more data pre-processing and further development before applying the framework more widely.

2 – An inexpensive and easy-to-implement approach to a Quality Management System for an academic research lab

This Research Article describes how researchers could improve the quality of preclinical research in academic (or low budget) laboratories, as the authors begin to describe a road map to increasing preclinical research value and output with minimal financial input.

“The subject is relevant to the life sciences in general, as concerns with research quality are on the rise, and describing the development and implementation of a QMS within a lab is a worthy contribution,” peer reviewers Clarissa Carneiro and Olavo Amaral (both Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) stated in their initial report.

The team, including Xiaolong Fan from Beijing Normal University, applies the proposed strategy catalogue to a cell culture-focussed laboratory, taking specific steps to minimise opportunities for individual differences in working techniques. The team further reports that positive outcomes have already been observed regarding the quality of experimental results, as well as in sample and data storage, stakeholder engagement and even in the promotion of their research.

As peer reviewers, Judith de Haan and Frank Miedema (both Utrecht University, The Netherlands), commented:

“It is an interesting manuscript that shows that research groups can improve the quality of their experimental work without spending lots of money. It is great that researchers feel the need to improve their own practice, even if that does not immediately lead to more publications or more funding, but because it will improve the reproducibility of their work and contribute to the quality of the whole research field they are working in.”

The researchers conclude the article commenting on the potential implications of rolling out guidance such as this, including a greater trust in science in society as well as reduced inequality and discrimination between stakeholders.

3 – Elevated eosinophil levels observed in infantile hemangioma patients from Kaifeng, China

The final article in this year’s ‘Top 3’ is a Brief Report from an international team, including Xianglei Li, Chunyan Ma, Jiaoyang Xu and Biao Gao from Kaifeng Central Hospital in China.

With more of a clinical focus compared to the other articles, the article suggests a novel diagnostic or prognostic relevance of eosinophils in the blood for infantile hemangioma, which the authors report is ‘one of the most common soft-tissue neoplasms of infancy’.

While the authors further report that more research is required to determine whether eosinophil levels increase progressively through the distinct clinical phases, they continue to describe the significance of their findings specifically in Chinese children as they close their discussion.

Exploring open research in China

As the global scientific community looked to fast and open opportunities for publishing findings related to COVID-19, it is a refreshing observation that open research submissions from China between December 2019 and February 2021 have not been entirely focused on coronavirus, but represent a diverse landscape of scholarly research.

Having publicly declared a commitment to supporting open access research (by way of supporting but not officially joining Plan S), it is not a surprise to see submissions to open research publishers grow in recent years, especially as efforts to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic require fast and global access to research. 

Having issued a directive in 2017 requiring the sharing of publicly funded research, it appears the The Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Finance are further supporting the aims of Plan S and, by extension, open access research.

However, this commitment is not a new one, as Xiaolan Zhang from the National Science Library (Chinese Academy of Sciences) argued in an article in Insights in March 2014. Zhang goes on to argue that open access research in China is backed by government, public and research community support, confident that an open landscape would soon be the norm for Chinese research.

While this may have been perceived as an optimistic prediction at the time, Zhang has since re-iterated this stance, stating at the Open Access 2020 conference (2018) that any notion that China lacked interest in open access is “misleading”, as China actively takes steps towards a more open publishing landscape.

There is further evidence supporting an open data movement in China, where an ‘open data community’ appears to be pushing for an open data ecosystem in the country. Unlike other large countries where open data initiatives may have been written into policy, the open data movement has been reported to be driven by citizens, non-profits and government leaders.

With open data and open access an apparent priority for Chinese ministries, institutions and the research community, it stands to reason that it will not be long before we see further commitments to open research publication and open science from China.