The institute has been devoting great efforts to international collaboration and academic exchange. It has developed long term and solid partnership with well-known institutions and universities of 30+ countries/regions, such as Stanford University (US), University of California, Berkeley (US), the Royal Society of London (UK), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) (France), Max Planck Society (Germany), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, among many others.

IOP Center for International Collaboration (CIC) was established in 2010 to reinforce and expand its collaboration networks. In recent years, the average in-coming visits are around 500 per year, while the out-going visits are around 700 per year. Among the invited visitors, many are renowned scientists, and some are Nobel laureates. IOP has founded a number of lecture series to host their talks, e.g. "Daniel C. Tsui's lectures", "Zhongguancun Forum", "Lectures of Advances in Condensed Matter Physics", and CIC Lectures, etc. IOP also invites overseas scientists to come to work during their sabbaticals, so as to allow for in-depth collaborations and communications between them and IOP faculty members. IOP also organizes high level international conferences and workshops on a regular basis.