The opening ceremony of the 2026 Pujiang Innovation Forum was held at Zhangjiang Science Hall in Shanghai on Sept 12, with the theme "Sharing Innovation and Shaping the Future: The Mission of the Global Sci-Tech Community Amid a New Round of Sci-Tech Revolution."

Major initiatives announced at the ceremony included four parts: a proposed global alliance of innovative cities, a basic research program for the Yangtze River Delta, a regional scientific data-sharing platform, and the 2025 list of leading science and technology journals.

Global alliance to connect innovative cities

Shanghai and UNESCO have reached a consensus to jointly launch the Global Innovative Cities Alliance, a platform designed to promote innovation cooperation among cities worldwide and help create an open, inclusive, and sustainable future for innovation.

Janos Kendernay, senior adviser on city diplomacy at Budapest City Hall, said Shanghai and Budapest have maintained a strong partnership and learned a great deal from each other's best practices.

He said Shanghai has remained open to the world amid global advances in science and technology and has been willing to share its development achievements with international partners, including Budapest. He added that further cooperation on innovative ideas and technologies in areas such as urban planning and transportation could create new opportunities for both cities.

Kendernay said Budapest looks forward to joining the alliance, which aligns closely with the city's development vision, particularly in using technology to improve people's well-being and build more livable cities.

Yangtze River Delta launches major basic research program

A major program under the National Natural Science Foundation of China's Yangtze River Delta Joint Fund for Basic Research was officially launched at the forum.

The five-year program will support applied basic research addressing major strategic and industrial needs across Shanghai and the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui.

Starting in 2027, Shanghai and the three provinces will each contribute 50 million yuan ($7.47 million) a year, with the National Natural Science Foundation of China providing another 50 million yuan. Annual funding will total 250 million yuan, bringing the five-year total to 1.25 billion yuan.

The first round will focus on two areas: life sciences and biomedicine, and future materials.

The program will explore a coordinated mechanism for joint funding, research agenda-setting, project management, and collaborative research across the YRD.

Regional scientific data platform takes shape

Construction of the Yangtze River Delta Scientific Data Sharing Service Platform was also launched.

Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui signed a framework agreement on the platform in June. It will bring together scientific data resources from across the region, with unified data access standards, an integrated data catalog and interconnected regional data centers.

The platform will also advance the development of digital infrastructure for blockchain and integrated intelligent computing.

Shanghai's scientific data-sharing platform, which went online in April, has already collected more than 30 terabytes of data across 52 disciplines, comprising over 6,000 datasets.

New journal list offers reference for global journal evaluation

The forum also released the 2025 list of the world's leading science and technology journals.

The list comprises 6,132 journals in 23 languages from 55 countries and regions. The United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and China had the most journals on the list. China had 353 journals, accounting for 5.8 percent of the total.

The evaluation uses nine indicators across four dimensions: academic organizational capacity, academic leadership, academic influence, and social impact. AI technologies also help establish knowledge links across publications in different languages.

The list sets a benchmark for the high-quality development of Chinese science and technology journals and provides an open, inclusive reference for journal evaluation by the global scientific community.

Source: Shanghai Municipal Commission of Science and Technology