Through various times in history, Greek, Latin, and English have been the lingua franca of science. Possibly others: Arabic, French, German. What are desirable features for a lingua franca for science, assuming we could switch away from, or modify, English?
Ability to coin new words, with guessable meanings, for new concepts. English reaches for Greek and Latin roots: not great because it requires knowledge of Greek and Latin, but it works.
Easy to write. Modern printed English has this; logographic languages like Japanese and Chinese are much harder to write, both for human input and for typesetting.
Machine readable with OCR. Again, modern printed English is pretty good, though mathematics is difficult. This is a vague vision of the future in which computers may be doing a lot of knowledge mining.
Ability to be precise in meaning. I'm not sure any language is any better than any other language on this point, especially because languages are living, so can be modified as necessary for when precision is demanded.
Easy to learn, at least the subset used to communicate science. English, with its tricky grammar and spelling, gets criticized on this point, though all living languages accrue complexity making them difficult to learn.
Easy to translate, especially machine translation. Of course, this depends of the distance between the two languages.
Easy to speak well enough for others to understand. Most languages do not have the unvoiced and voiced th sounds of English, but substituting s and z is still intelligible. Other difficulties: r/l, r-colored vowels. In contrast, I suspect tonal languages would not be easy for nontonal native speakers to learn.
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