China and PLOS Join Forces to Build a Global Open Science Sharing Network

In a move that could reshape how scientific knowledge circulates across the world, the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Public Library of Science, better known as PLOS, have formally signed a Memorandum of Understanding to jointly advance the Open for Science 10 Programme, or OS10. The agreement, announced at the end of September 2026, commits two of the most influential institutions in the open science movement to a shared agenda of building infrastructure, harmonising standards, and expanding capacity so that research data and publications can flow more freely across borders. For a field that has long struggled with fragmented repositories, incompatible metadata, and unequal access between wealthy and developing nations, the partnership signals a deliberate attempt to knit the pieces of the global open science ecosystem into something more coherent.

The OS10 Programme itself is an ambitious undertaking with an unusually high-level pedigree. Initiated under the leadership of Professor Wei Yang, a Chinese scientist and Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the programme carries the full title Towards Open Science Infrastructure Sharing Network: Knowledge and Data Sharing Platform from China. It received official endorsement from UNESCO in February 2025, placing it squarely within the guiding framework of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, the landmark 2021 instrument that defined shared principles for making research publications, data, software, and hardware openly available. The programme is also aligned with the strategic plan of the International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development, the United Nations designated Science Decade intended to mobilise scientific cooperation for global development goals.

Institutionally, the programme is structured as a distributed collaboration rather than a single centralised project. The National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Zhejiang University serve as the liaison and supporting institutions, handling coordination and operational support, while the CAST-UN Consultative Committee on Open Science and Global Partnership, known as CCOS, acts as the lead organisation. This arrangement reflects a broader philosophy within the open science community: that infrastructure for sharing knowledge should itself be shared, with responsibilities distributed across institutions and regions rather than concentrated in any one country or consortium. The new memorandum between NSL and PLOS extends that philosophy by bringing a major international publisher directly into the programme’s development.

Under the terms of the agreement, the two parties will explore cooperation across several concrete areas. These include the sharing of scientific research outputs and open science resources, the development of the technical architecture that underpins the OS10 platform, and open science capacity-building in regions that participate in the programme. PLOS may also join relevant OS10 working groups, contributing expertise to resource coordination, technical standards, and service design. For PLOS, a non-profit publisher that has spent two decades experimenting with open access business models, the memorandum offers a channel to test its ideas within a large-scale, internationally endorsed infrastructure initiative. For the Chinese institutions, it brings in a partner with deep experience in peer review reform, open licensing, and the practical mechanics of running scholarly publishing at scale.

Capacity-building receives particular emphasis in the memorandum. The two organisations plan to strengthen open science skills and institutional readiness in China and in other OS10 participant regions through training programmes, workshops, community engagement activities, and international exchange. This focus addresses one of the most persistent gaps in the open science landscape: the divide between institutions that have the technical staff, policies, and funding to share research openly and those that lack such capacity. Training librarians, data managers, and researchers in low-resource settings is widely seen as essential if global open science is to be genuinely inclusive rather than an advantage enjoyed only by well-funded institutions in North America, Europe, and East Asia.

The memorandum also opens the door to connecting OS10 with the outcomes of PLOS’s Redefining Publishing initiative, an ongoing effort by the publisher to reimagine the mechanisms of scholarly communication, and to expanding cooperation on open science policy and practice more broadly. The intersection is significant. Publishing reform and infrastructure development are often pursued on separate tracks, with publishers experimenting in their journals while infrastructure projects build repositories and platforms. A formal channel between a major open access publisher and a UNESCO-endorsed infrastructure programme creates the possibility of aligning those tracks, so that innovations tested in publishing workflows can inform the design of shared platforms, and vice versa.

OS10 is not starting from zero. The programme has already delivered three milestones that illustrate its scope. The first is the launch of the Open4Science platform, accessible at open4science.cn, which provides access to more than 100 million open science and technology resources and has already reached users in 105 countries. That scale matters: a discovery layer that aggregates open publications, datasets, and tools from many sources can dramatically lower the barrier for researchers who would otherwise need to search dozens of disconnected repositories. The platform’s reach across more than half the world’s countries suggests substantial demand for such aggregation, particularly in regions where national open science infrastructure is still nascent.

The second milestone is the development of the International Specification for Open Knowledge and Data Sharing and Application, a standards document intended to advance international collaboration and the sharing of open science infrastructures. Technical standards are the unglamorous backbone of any sharing network. Without agreed specifications for how metadata is described, how licences are declared, and how datasets are exchanged, even the most well-intentioned platforms remain islands. A specification developed with international participation and endorsed through a programme of this stature could serve as a common reference point for institutions building compatible systems, much as shared protocols underpinned the growth of the early web.

The third milestone is the release of the Open Science Readiness Index, or OSRI, together with its associated monitoring platform. The index maps open science development and trends across all 193 UN Member States, providing what is effectively a global diagnostic of where countries stand in adopting open science policies, building infrastructure, and cultivating practice. Monitoring tools of this kind serve two purposes. They give policymakers an evidence base for targeting investment and capacity-building where readiness is lowest, and they create a baseline against which progress during the Science Decade can be measured. Combined with the Open4Science platform and the international specification, the index completes a triad of infrastructure, standards, and measurement that gives OS10 a distinctive profile among open science initiatives.

The significance of the NSL-PLOS memorandum lies less in any single deliverable than in what it represents: a convergence between China’s rapidly growing open science infrastructure efforts and the international publishing community’s reform agenda, mediated through a UNESCO-endorsed framework. The stated ambition of both parties is to promote the open sharing and innovative use of scientific knowledge and data, contributing to a more open, inclusive, equitable, and sustainable global open science ecosystem. Whether that ambition translates into durable, interoperable systems will depend on execution over the coming years, but the ingredients are now in place: a platform with global reach, an emerging specification, a readiness index covering every UN member state, and a formal partnership linking infrastructure builders with one of open access publishing’s most experienced innovators. For researchers, librarians, and policymakers watching the open science transition, the OS10 programme is now one of the initiatives to watch.

Subject of Research: International cooperation on open science infrastructure through the OS10 Programme

Article Title: National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences and PLOS sign MOU on jointly advancing the OS10 Programme

Article References: National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences and PLOS sign MOU on jointly advancing the OS10 Programme. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: open science, PLOS, Chinese Academy of Sciences, National Science Library, OS10, UNESCO, Open4Science, open access, research data sharing, open science infrastructure, capacity building, International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development