From October 15 to October 20, 2023, Deputy Director Wu Jianyong and his entourage visited Germany to participate in the special seminar and annual meeting of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM Association) in Frankfurt, and visit Springer Nature in Heidelberg with an invitation from Dr. Niels Peter Thomas (President of Springer Nature Greater China).

During the discussion at STM Association, besides listening to the report of "Open Research and Research Integrity" by Vicky Gardener, Chairman of the STM Open Research Committee of the China Symposium, and the theme reports of the STM Association Annual Conference with the theme of "Open/Shift: Impact, Integrity, Social Responsibility", they participated in discussion and exchange on publication management and policy, methods for determining the early warning list of international journals, artificial intelligence and publishing ethics, copyright trade, and publishing, especially open access publishing and open scientific research, and promoted the Journal of Cotton Research with leaflets and publicity materials with the journal logo and two dimensional bar code. At Springer Nature Group, Dr. Niels Peter Thomas introduced the group's publishing cooperation methods, academic training and exchange activities, and the progress of cooperation and exchanges with China's publishing industry. They also discussed and exchanged views on academic integrity, the opportunities and challenges brought by artificial intelligence to academic publishing, and the experience of journal operation with three senior employees of the Group. During the visit, they also visited the 75th Frankfurt Book Fair to learn about the trends in international academic book/journal publishing and copyright trade.

STM is an association of international academic and professional publishers, with more than 140 members, covering 21 countries, including China, and publishing 66% of the world's journal articles each year. Springer Nature's more than 2000 journals published nearly 100000 articles by Chinese scholars and nearly 1000 books in 2022 alone. During the seminar, they established contacts with the heads of STM, Springer Nature Group and their domestic branches, and learned about the academic publishing of major publishing groups in Europe and the United States and the new trend of promoting scientific research development: the transformation from OA publishing of academic results to open scientific research, deepened the understanding of open scientific research and academic integrity, and the advantages of open scientific research in addressing the challenges of scientific research academic integrity. These new developments in international publishing/scientific research provide a good reference for the future international scientific research cooperation, scientific research evaluation and academic integrity system construction, and the improvement of journal publishing in the Institute of Cotton Research of CAAS.