“It is the spring of hope, it is the winter of despair.” While the lasting pandemic has put a halt to our lives, the research communities are still fighting to find a decisive solution to COVID-19. Now more than ever, we need science to get back the lives we led. In order to expedite this, we want to help with opening the way for science. Setting our sights on a broad range of targets including the global science frontiers, the main economic battlefield, the significant needs of the country as well as people’s lives and health, we embark on a journey of starting a journal, National Science Open (NSO).

NSO welcomes a transformative culture to embrace open science. Access to high-quality frontier research should be made freely available to everyone. Transparency in authorship and sharing original research data facilitate to battle issues of academic integrity plaguing our community.

NSO also aims to remove the disciplinary barrier. The frustration cannot be overemphasized when an interdisciplinary research work is rejected due to discord with a journal’s scope, while scientific innovation often results from seeing a problem from other perspectives.

Science prevails when in-depth discussion and communication among scientists are established world- wide. Cohesive international collaborations inspire the collision of conventional concepts, which paves the way for new ideas. The editorial board of NSO consists of more than one hundred leading scientists around the world to facilitate the discussion and dissemination of latest research. NSO roots deeply in opening the barriers between scientists, as it is published globally by publishers owned by renowned societies, and is determined to grow the journal into a forum for the global science community.

Long have many authors hoped for alternatives to the tedious formality of some of the academic journals. The length of the manuscript and the number of figures should be flexible. NSO values the precious time of authors by promoting an author-friendly publication experience.

With valuable and consistent efforts from the entire community, I firmly believe NSO is bound to grow into a flagship brand of comprehensive journals, through which open science will contribute to addressing common scientific issues, breaking through research bottlenecks, as well as enlightening us with novel academic ideas.

© The Author(s) 2022. Published by China Science Publishing & Media Ltd. and EDP Sciences.