Nature China's opening conferences
Last week, Nature held mini-conferences in Beijing and Shanghai to celebrate the launch of Nature China. There were over 200 attendees in Beijing, and Liu Depei, president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and vice president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, gave the opening remarks, together with Daoxiang Sun of Tsinghua University Council. Also speaking were Huang Laiqiang of Tsinghua University, who last year was a coauthor of a paper in Nature on self pollination in orchids (Nature 441, 945-946; 2006), and Xiaolin Zhang, head of the Innovation Center China of AstraZeneca and sponsor of Nature China, who outlined the company's activities in the region.
A similar event was held at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS), organized by Dangsheng Li, deputy editor in chief of Cell Research, a journal based at SIBS and part of Nature Publishing Group's Asia-Pacific academic journal programme. The meeting was attended by about 120 people, with talks by Jarui Wu, vice president of SIBS, and Hong-Wei Xue, deputy director of the Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who provided tips on publishing in international journals.
According to results presented at the conferences, in 2006, scientists from mainland China and Hong Kong published more than 80,000 scientific papers that were indexed by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), bringing the output of scientific research at the same level (in numbers) as the United Kingdom and Japan.
Additional data from ISI indicate that the number of high impact papers from China with large numbers of citations is also increasing rapidly in number year on year.
Every week, Nature China’s editors select some of the best recently published research from across the scientific and medical literature, and provide short easy-to-understand summaries of the results. The website also allows users to recommend research articles for inclusion, and to vote on those recommendations. Furthermore, the website has an archive of highlights of 154 research articles published in top scientific journals since 2000, and in the case of research articles highlighted from Nature journals, the original full text scientific articles are made freely available to registered users of Nature China.
