TEHRAN – The Silk Road Science Fund (SRSF), an organization operated jointly by the Iranian Vice Presidency for Science and Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has launched the seventh edition of a program to provide support for joint scientific activities by Iranian and Chinese researchers.

The SRSF has issued a call for joint projects from the Iranian and Chinese researchers and technical experts that will receive support from the Iran National Science Foundation (INSF) -a department of the Iranian Vice Presidency for Science and Technology- and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

The program will sponsor joint research and development projects and hold joint workshops between the two countries’ researchers.

A maximum of six joint research projects will receive approval to benefit from the fund’s support in the fields of water science and advanced materials within the framework of research and development projects.

The call for projects will be open until June 19, as the Iranian researchers can submit their joint proposals in the Silk Road Science Fund’s online system.

The final results on the projects qualified to receive support from the fund will be announced in early October, and the joint research projects will officially kick off in January 2023.

Science diplomacy at highest level

Data from the Scopus International Citation Database show that Iran’s scientific diplomacy has reached more than 34 percent since the beginning of 2021, the highest level in the past 20 years.

Science diplomacy is the use of scientific collaborations among nations to address common problems and build constructive international partnerships. It is a form of new diplomacy and has become an umbrella term to describe a number of formal or informal technical, research-based, academic, or engineering exchanges, within the general field of international relations.

Comparing the rate of 2020 with 2019, Iran with a growth of 12.5 percent and with a slight difference from India has gained second place in the world in terms of the growth of world science diplomacy, Mohammad Javad Dehghani, head of the Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC), said.

In 2011, the share of Iranian articles with international participation was about 16.5 percent, which increased to 19.7 percent in 2016 and gradually in the following years, so that in 2020 and 2021, reached 30.5 and 34.2 percent, respectively, he added.

The share of Iranian articles with international participation has had significant growth of 209 percent during an eight-year period (2013-2020), becoming the Islamic world’s leading country in science diplomacy, according to the Scopus International Citation Database.

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