China's Vice Minister of Science and Technology Cheng Jinpei said Tuesday that the ministry is speeding up a scientific data sharing project in an effort to reduce repeated research and money squandering.

Low efficiency in sharing scientific data is now a bottleneck for the country's innovation efforts in research, said Cheng, also academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in a keynote speech at the International Workshop on Strategies for Preservation of and Open Access to Scientific Data.

The Chinese government has already placed the scientific data sharing project as one important job for building the national scientific and technological research infrastructure, Cheng said, adding that his ministry will go all out to build up and improve the project.

Experts said that scientific data are not only strategic resources for research community, but also key information for governmental decision making.

Most of the scientific data in China are still not digitized and open access to those resources are limited, the experts said.

In 2002, the ministry kicked off the scientific data sharing project, which is still underway. The whole project will include a three-level system, one portal website, 40 scientific data centers and about 300 main databases.

More than 100 scientists from 12 countries, including France, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and China, are attending the two-day symposium, which is organized by the ministry and the Committee on Data for Science and Technology, an international scientific body.

(Xinhua News Agency June 23, 2004)