Law-making has played vital role in guaranteeing China's development of science and technology, according to the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Following the promulgation of the laws to promote science and technology advancement and to speed up research achievement transfer in the previous years, the National People's Congress (NPC), China's top legislature, is formulating a law to improve science popularization.

The supporting of science and technology development is also shown in other laws.

For example, in the law to help develop small and medium-sized enterprises, a chapter of encouraging technical innovation is included. And the chapters and articles to spur and finance high-tech industries have also been taken in the law of governmental procurement.

At the same time, China has improved its legislation on intellectual property rights along with its economic development over the past two decades.

The country's legal system on intellectual property initially took shape in the 1980s. National legislators passed the Trademark Law in 1982, the Patent Law in 1984 and the Copyright Law in 1990 respectively. The three laws are backbone legislation on intellectual property rights.

Currently, the Ministry of Science and Technology has been involved in the law-drafting research work to strengthen bio-security and information-technology security.

Meanwhile, the State Council also has started drafting regulations governing research equipment management and scientific data-sharing platform. The government's focus in the near future will be to build a legislative framework to encourage the sharing of data.

The regulations may help deal with chronic duplication and lack of funding in scientific research in China, ministry sources said.

The ministry already released national guidelines to ensure scientists across the country to have better research conditions and allow them to share resources.

Sixteen cabinet departments have already created an inter-ministerial meeting system to build an innovative basic research platform. Twenty-three senior scientists are working as advisers.

Vice-Minister of Science and Technology Liu Yanhua said the idea is to address major problems facing China's basic science research.

Over the last two decades, China did not have a national blueprint of basic research, leading to duplicated projects. And previously, scientific documents were separated among research institutes, making it difficult to search for specific data.

Database needed

Scientists had to pay to use data owned by other institutes, and it was impossible to buy data because research funds were very limited.

Another effort of the government is to develop procedures to increase the transparency of the way that it spends its growing research budget.

The move follows recent complaints about alleged bias and inefficiency in procedures that are currently used.

Under guidelines issued by the ministry, the government will store information about all those involved in the receipt of state funding for research, including not only the researchers and their supervisors, but also the peer reviewers whose opinions were consulted during the allocation of research grants.

The information, which will be held on a national database that is publicly accessible, will include records of all the grants received by individual researchers, and how they have been spent.

As well as recording professional achievements, the database will also provide details of malpractice by researchers, such as established instances of plagiarism, the falsification of data, and attempts to publish the same research more than once.

According to Xu Guanhua, minister of science and technology, a national campaign to collect this information will begin shortly.

The government will use the database when deciding on the allocation of research funds, and may involve the public in this process.

Xu is keen that all national research and development projects should eventually operate under the system.

(China Daily October 5, 2004)