Towards a French Open Science Monitor for research data and software codes

News from the Committee
11/10/2021

The French Open Science Monitor was created in 2019 in the framework of the National Plan for Open Science. It was the first step towards setting up indicators to assess the progress of open science in France. It consists of indicators and visualisation tools which show the proportion of publications in open access by year, publisher or discipline. It is based on an entirely open methodology (open data, open code, published methodology) and is independent of proprietary data sources.

In 2020, the Université de Lorraine published the first local version of the French Monitor with the Lorraine Region Open Science Monitor. This shows the proportion of publications according to their home institution. It is also open source, supported by a methodology and has prompted other institutions to create their own Monitor such as the Université d’Évry, Paris-Saclay University, the Université Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines among many others.

The Second National Plan for Open Science aims to enhance the Open Science Monitor with additional capabilities covering a wider range of scientific objects. The launch of the next edition of the Monitor is scheduled for the end of the year and will incorporate elements of open science and transparency in relation to health research, including new information on clinical trials and observational studies.

The plan also aims to give France the capacity to monitor the opening of data and source codes. This involves significant methodological challenges that require specific research and development work. We are pleased to announce the start of work towards this goal in the framework of a coalition of actors.

The Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MESRI) has mandated the Université de Lorraine to lead this project alongside the MESRI’s Département des Outils d’Aide à la Décision (Decision Making Support Tools Department) and the INRIA. The project will be led by a team with varied backgrounds and skills: Laetitia Bracco (Université de Lorraine, project leader), Jean-François Lutz (Université de Lorraine), Aricia Bassinet (Université de Lorraine), Emmanuel Weisenburger (MESRI), Eric Jeangirard (MESRI), Anne L’Hôte (INRIA) and Laurent Romary (INRIA). A technical and usage committee associating the University of Grenoble-Alpes, the Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (Inist) and Committee for Open Science’s Data College will support the project team.

The project has a budget of €476,000 thanks to financial support from the French national recovery plan [1]“Développer l’utilisation de la donnée dans votre administration (IA, décisionnel, échange de données, open data, archivage” (Developing the use of data in your administration (AI, decision-making, data exchange, open data, archiving, etc.) programme., the MESRI and the INRIA. It will begin in September 2021 and run for a period of two years. The first deliverables and indicators are expected in 2022.

 

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