"Open science is very important to the scientific community because the community's progress is achieved by sharing the analysis and results of the research," Nathalie Lemarchand, president of the International Geographical Union (IGU), told Science and Technology Daily during the Satellite Symposium on Open Science, Research Assessment and Publishing in Beijing on October 20.

This was echoed by Nokuthula Mchunu, deputy director at the African Open Science Platform hosted by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. "If you open the sciences up, you can have more people participating, more discoveries and more understanding of the challenges that we face in society, and then you can be quicker to find the solutions."

To deal with challenges facing open science development, Lemarchand said a big scientific organization is needed, such as the International Science Council (ISC) and UNESCO. They can collaborate with governments and international organizations to help the scientific community to cope with challenges concerning open science.

Lemarchand, a human geographer, said, open science plays a major role in promoting international cooperation when it is fair, findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. By good practices, open science can become a global public good for everyone.

Interoperability matters more in quantitative research, she said, as it is a way to standardize the research process and data so that they can be used in different disciplines or sections.

Physical geographers and those working on geomatics and the geographic information systems use a huge quantity of data in their research, and they need to find a good system to make the data reusable between geographers from different countries, such as China and Hungary, Lemarchand explained.

Researchers at California State University- San Bernardino (USA) and Beijing Normal University (BNU, China) compiled a database of more than 1,000 journals under the framework of IGU, and it is now updated by scholars at BNU.

IGU and BNU scholars are searching for open access journals inside this database, and will communicate this information to the whole geographical community, and encourage them to publish in these journals, Lemarchand said.

This is only a glimpse of China's efforts in promoting open science. In November 2024, China, Brazil, South Africa and the African Union jointly launched the Initiative on International Cooperation in Open Science to build an open, fair, impartial and non-discriminatory global environment for science and technology development.

The Chinese scientific community proposed an initiative named Towards Open Science Infrastructure Sharing Network: China's Knowledge and Data Sharing Platform — Open for Science10. It was endorsed by the Executive Committee of UNESCO's International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development in February 2025, and launched in June the same year.

At the symposium, Qu Jiansheng, director of the National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NSLC), which coordinated the initiative, launched OPEN SCIENCE, an open-access journal adopting a new publishing model known as meta-knowledge publishing. It is the first scientific journal in the world to be directly named "Open Science," according to NSLC.

The Open for Science10 team released the Open Science Readiness Index framework for geoscience data centers (OSRI-data), together with the results of its first assessment.

It's easy to see why Chinese open science initiatives have taken off and advanced at a rapid pace, Mchunu said. "Because we've seen how they've been participating and making efforts in different initiatives in open science and open access."

Topics such as the reform of research assessment systems, the governance of scientific publishing and the trustworthiness of the scientific record were also discussed at the symposium.

The symposium was held under the framework of the 2026 International Science Council (ISC) Midterm Members' Meeting and Beijing Science Dialogue. It was jointly organized by the NSLC, International Astronomical Union, Chinese Astronomical Society, National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the ISC.