French Second National Plan for Open Science: Support and Opportunities for Universities' Open Infrastructures and Practices.
Creators: name: Forcadell, Sophie
name: Rege, Adeline
Publisher: name: Forschungzentrum Jülich
Year: 2022

description: doi:10.5281/ZENODO.6365997
description: The French second National Plan for Open Science was launched in July 2021 and will run through 2024. Through 4 lines of action, the plan seeks to foster open science practices, to make science more effective, more transparent and more accessible, and to contribute to the EU goal of promoting open science. Its funding, which amounts to €15 million per year, will further facilitate the dissemination and sharing of publications, research data and codes produced in France, as well as increasing open research practices among research units and universities. This second national plan includes research source codes, provides a framework for actions in fostering data openness and sharing, for example through the creation of the national repository for research data. The plan multiplies the transformational levers for spreading open science practices among various disciplines. It is strongly oriented towards Europe and proposes, in the context of the French presidency of the European Union, that open science practices be efficiently taken into account in individual and collective research evaluations. The 4 action lines are the following: 1. Generalise open access to scientific publications; 2. Structuring, sharing and opening up research data; 3. Open and promote source codes produced by research; 4. Transform practices to make open science the default principle. We focus on a double opportunity that this plan offers to French universities: the possibility of relying on a national policy framework to advance their own policies, infrastructures and practices on the one hand, and the implementation of cooperation between universities to improve systems and their visibility at international level on the other. The first use case relates to the national research data repository, Recherche Data Gouv, which will be available in the first quarter of 2022. It aims to structure research data and make them openly available. We take the example of data.sciencespo, Sciences Po's institutional repository, to show how it will be integrated into Research Data Gouv and will benefit from complementary national initiatives to support researchers and university support staff in adopting open data practices. The second use case concerns the 4th action line, and more precisely its measure n°10, whose objective is to develop the open science skills of students and support staff throughout their career. The example of the University of Strasbourg shows how this national impetus makes it possible to strengthen the cooperation already established within EUCOR-the European Campus with German (Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg) and Swiss (Universität Basel) partners to train support staff and doctoral students in research data management. Workshops for the exchange of practices bringing together the support teams are organised on a regular basis and a training offer shared between the partners is implemented for the doctoral students of the EUCOR programmes.