China’s young scientists build academic journal from the ground up
- With no official support, the founders poured their savings into creating an equal for the West’s most esteemed publications
- In its first two years The Innovation has become a respected English-language choice for Chinese and overseas academics
Two years after the first edition of The Innovation appeared, the online journal has grown into an active and respected publication. Its success is a vindication for the scientists who poured their own savings into the project, with no official support.
“China was about to become the world’s largest producer of scientific papers, but most of the top research results were going into Western journals such as Science and Nature,” said one of The Innovation’s founders Duke Chen, a former cancer researcher from the Beijing Institute of Genomics.
“We need to have our own Science and Nature, and the time is now.”
The idea was first mooted in 2016, during discussions at a council meeting of the Youth Innovation Promotion Association (YIPA), a national network of researchers under the age of 35 set up by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the world’s largest research institution.
YIPA, which has thousands of members from the academy’s research institutes, was created to support young scientists by connecting them to their peers from different disciplines and promoting their exchanges.
While the idea was met with some enthusiasm at the council meeting, requests for support from the national funding agencies were turned down flat.