Do we still need scientific journals in the 21st century? This concern haunted me throughout COVID-19, stated Gao Fu, the editor-in-chief of the Chinese Science Bulletin (in Chinese) and Science Bulletin.
He made the keynote speech at a parallel panel including global scientific journals of the 2025 Zhongguancun Forum held in Beijing.He stated a plain example: When the U.S.
CDC unexpectedly removed avian flu information from public platforms, pointing out a Trump-administration executive order, it exposed how quickly science can be silenced.
On the other hand, preprint platforms flooded with claims like SARS-CoV-2 contains HIV-like sequences just because someone identified 3-5 similar amino acids.
This isnt science; its the infodemic in action, Gao said.Gaos option? Enhance peer-reviewed journals as fact filters against what he calls inforus &-- a term he coined for misinformation that acts like an altering virus.As the former director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, he introduced the term in 2022 to conceive false information as a virus-like agent triggering infodemics, or the mis/disinformation epidemic, stressing its contagious spread and societal damage while advocating for structured scientific study and international countermeasures.
When you are speaking about international health, when you are discussing public health, whenever you have this outbreak or any event like the pandemic, you got to remember you are in a position to try to avoid 2 infections, biological infection and inforus, Gao said in an interview with CGTN.To counter infodemics and avoid the spread of inforus, Gao stated the very best way is to check out science books.
The public understanding of science is a sort of vaccination, he explained.
Toward that end, Gao wrote 2 to 3 books each year for the previous 6 years to attempt to bridge the expert-public gap.However, Gao kept in mind that people evolutionary predisposition to share sensational information makes reports hard to include and hence requires international cooperation.
Lets collaborate to embrace the real globalization, the real global dependence, to overtake the genuine info, he said.The role of clinical journals Scientific journal is not for the public, Gao said.
Scientific journal is for the experts to share their ideas, their scientific findings, their thoughts and even their hypothesis.
Therefore, Gao highlighted the value of data sharing and policy partnership in all aspects of advancing worldwide public health initiatives.Gao has actually founded 3 global journals, Protein - & Cell, China CDC Weekly, and hLife.
They are viewed as signs of Chinas shift from a mere contributor to a manufacturer of scientific discourse.
Now I think we remain in the ideal position.
Now, we need our scientific journals.
This is why I introduced 3 journals, and Chinese clinical journals are growing, said Gao.As of 2024, Beijing hosted 292 English-language sci-tech journals, representing 54 percent of the national total, according to Yu Yingjie, the secretary of the Education Work Committee under the Beijing Municipal CPC Committee, as he provided an opening remark to the panel.
According to the Statistical Report on Chinas Scientific Papers launched by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC), China maintained its worldwide leadership in 2024 across the most prominent journal papers, top quality worldwide journal documents, and citations.
China currently publishes more (journals) than the U.S., the nation that releases most of the world, Anders Karlsson, vice president of academic relations of Elsevier in the Asia Pacific.
We value quite the collaboration with China, Karlsson told CGTN.