What is Open Science ?
Open science is a new model, emerging in the digital age, which aims to democratise the dissemination and sharing of scientific knowledge. It aims to take publicly funded research out of the confines of closed databases. In concrete terms, this means making the results of scientific research, whether publications or data, accessible to all, free of charge and without delay, with the aim of encouraging scientific cooperation, while respecting confidentiality and ethics.
What are the challenges?
- Open science increases the quality and transparency of research by allowing unfettered access to more information;
- Open science promotes the reuse of data to enhance the value of research results and accelerate innovation;
- Open science is a lever for scientific integrity and helps to restore citizens' trust in science.
In France, the second national plan for open science (2021-2024) continues the ambition of the 2016 law for a digital republic and confirmed by the 2020 research programming law. This policy has also been formalised since September 2018 in the Plan S, led by the cOAlition S, which brings together many national funding bodies, including the ANR.
Around four axes, this new plan sets up the conditions for the development of open science in France, fully in line with its international commitments (OGP – Open government partnership) and also meets the European ambition of the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science.
1st axis: generalise open access to publications
- Generalise the obligation to publish in open access articles and books resulting from research financed by calls for projects from public funds.
- Support economic models of open access publishing without publication fees for authors (“diamond” model).
- Promote multilingualism and the circulation of scientific knowledge by translating the publications of French researchers.
2nd axis: structure, share and open up research data
- Implement the obligation to disseminate publicly funded research data.
- Create Recherche Data Gouv, the federated national platform for research data.
- Promote the adoption of a data policy across the entire research data cycle, to make it easy to find, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR ).
3rd axis: open and promote source codes produced by research
- Promote and support the open source code dissemination of publicly funded research
- Promote the production of source code in higher education, research and innovation
- Define and promote an open source software policy
4th axis: transform practices to make open science the default principle
- Develop and enhance open science skills throughout the careers of students and research staff
- Valuing open science and the diversity of scientific production in the evaluation of researchers and teacher-researchers, projects and research institutions
- Triple the budget for open science using the National Fund for Open Science and the Future Investment Programme