On April 2, the State Council issued a regulation on the management of scientific data involved in natural science, engineering and technology, and other science fields.

According to the regulation, research institutions and scientific data producers should collect scientific data and build a database and data quality control system based on relevant standards.

Central and local authorities should establish rules and regulations while implementing national scientific data policies. Scientific data centers should be set up by qualified institutions and supervised by authorities, and will be responsible for the collection, classification, processing and analysis of data.

If data produced in government-funded research are used to write papers and for publication in foreign academic journals, they should be reported to related scientific data centers before being published.

The data produced in the research projects funded by private capital, if involving state secrets, national security and the public interest, also should be reported.

Data produced through government funding should be open to the public, except that which involves state secrets, national security, the public interest, commercial secrets and individual privacy.

Users of scientific data must abide by regulations on intellectual property rights and give credit to the producers of the data.

Authorities and research institutions should strengthen full life circle security management on scientific data, such as the authorization and authentication for downloading data.