With the fast development of internet technology, the whole world becomes more transparent and so does the scientific community. More and more scientists and researchers want their research articles to reach wider audiences, and more importantly, to be accessed by their global colleagues without a subscription barrier. No doubt, open access is the way that can help.

As part of international Open Access Week, Springer Nature Open Research Day was held in Beijing on Oct. 20^th. Chief Executive Officer of Springer Nature, Derk Haank, and President of Springer Nature in Great China, Charlotte Liu, gave a warm welcome to all attendees and reaffirmed Springer Nature’s commitment to open access.

Followed by the opening speech, experienced editors from both BioMed Central and Nature Publishing Group gave several talks on different aspects of scientific publishing, such as, how to identify quality journals; how to write a high quality article and publish it in highly selective journals; as well as the importance of the reproducibility of scientific results and the publication ethics.

More and more scientists and researchers want their research articles to reach wider audiences, and more importantly, to be accessed by their global colleagues without a subscription barrier.

Dr. Xiaolin Zhang, the former director of National Science Library of Chinese Academy of Sciences gave an informative presentation on the development of Open Access in China. Dr. Zhang emphasized the strong support to public sharing of knowledge from Chinese government by quoting the speech from the Premier of China, Mr. Keqiang Li, at the GRC Annual Conference 2014, “Knowledge is a public good. A more open environment will enable everyone to share the fruits of knowledge and promote inclusive development…, China will support open access for publicly funded research.”

He pointed out that the two open access mandates issued by National Natural Science Foundation of China and Chinese Academy of Sciences have facilitated the public access to research articles funded by the two major funding agencies. In addition, Dr. Zhang shared his expectation for the future of open access in China.

He wished that other funding agencies, such as Ministry of Education and Ministry of Science and Technology of China, as well as Chinese universities could issue their open access mandates to support funded researchers sharing their findings with the public.

In addition, Dr. Sabina Alam, editor of BMC Medicine chaired a discussion panel focusing on the collaboration between basic and medical research. Dr. Bin Du from Peking Union Medical College Hospital;Dr. You-Lin Qiao from Cancer Institute/Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences; and Dr. Tianzi Jiang from Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences joined in this discussion.

Effective communications and efficient sharing of information from both sides

As we all noticed, collaborations between basic researchers and clinical physicians is an important issue in the medical field. How to improve the efficiency and effectiveness in such collaborations is a question for the whole medical research community to solve.

The three researchers discussed this topic thoroughly and came up with an identical conclusion that effective communications and efficient sharing of information from both sides is a useful way to promote the collaboration between basic and clinical researchers.

This event ended with the closing speech from Caroline Black, editorial director of BioMed Central.  I felt so proud to be part of this event and the ongoing open access movement. I look forward to embracing the future of scientific research community through Open Research, with open access articles, open data and collaboration opportunities.