Publication of the National Fund for Open Science’s activity report for 2022-2024

The National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) was set up in 2019 and is the financial instrument of the national open science policy. It provides financial support for projects and initiatives that contribute to the development of open science and its main infrastructures

The FNSO is administered by a scientific interest group (GIS) managed by the CNRS’s Open Research Data Department (DDOR). The Open Science Steering Committee is chaired by the Director for Research and Innovation and made up of the heads of France’s higher education and research institutions. Its role is to decide which calls for proposals and initiatives should be funded by the FNSO. In summer 2024, the Committee reaffirmed its confidence in the FNSO GIS by unanimously voting to renew its founding agreement for five years. At the same meeting, a new member, the High Council for the Evaluation of Research and Higher Education (HCÉRES), joined the group.

The FNSO’s first activity report covered the 2019-2021 period which also corresponds to the First National Plan for Open Science. The second report published today covers the 2022-2024 period and gives details of the actions funded in the framework of the second National Plan for Open Science.

Between 2022 and 2024, the Fund managed €12.6 million with most of that sum coming from the Ministry of Higher Education and Research. Its most notable actions include:

• supporting the development of Recherche Data Gouv, the national ecosystem dedicated to the management, sharing and opening up of French research data, to the tune of approximately €7.5 million. Recherche Data Gouv has been consolidated by establishing its governance and setting up a joint service unit for the data platform segment;
• organising and funding the third call for projects promoting open scientific publishing (€2.2 million);
• maintaining the same level of funding for major French national open science infrastructures like HAL along with their international counterparts like the Research Data Alliance, Software Heritage and SCOSS-labelled infrastructures (€1.3 million).

The FNSO also provided support for other initiatives set out in the Second National Plan for Open Science. These include the Open Science Research Data Awards, free research software and theses and the creation of the Alliance of French Public Scientific Publishers (Alef) and the Global Research Initiative on Open Science (GRIOS).

Read the report (inFrench): National Fund for Open Science scientific interest group’s Activity Report for 2022-2024