People’s Daily online
Xin Hua News Agency, June 23 (reporter: Zhang Jingyong) “With the development of our national science and technology and the elevation of innovation competence, the low efficiency of scientific resources application and iterate wasting become main bottleneck factors for national scientific development,” vice president of Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) Cheng Jinpei indicated lately.
According to MOST, scientific data are basic scientific and technologic data, materials and related information generated in scientific activities and processes of production in human society, which are the most basal, active and widely influential scientific resources in Information Time. Scientific data are not only key strategic resources for scientific innovation, economic development, and national security, but also an important gist by which the government set down policies and make scientific decisions. We have accumulated abundant scientific data resources since long before, but most of them are stored in archives and have not been effectively arranged. Sharing of the present scientific data is deficient. Many databases are accessible only to the one sector or unit, or only to individuals. There is insufficient exchange and communication among sectors, and data sharing open to the society is far from being realized. The scientific realm has urgent demands upon breading the data barrier and realizing data sharing.
Cheng Peijin said that conducting data protection and sharing is a significant task. Chinese government attaches great importance to scientific data sharing, and has included it into the construction of national scientific infrastructure platform.
The Project of Scientific Data Sharing implemented by MOST since 2002 has 3 levels of systems, including 1 website, 40 data centers, and over 300 databases, which forms an important part of the construction of national scientific infrastructure platform.