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National context

National context

Open science, which has its origins in the open access movement of the 1990s/2000s, is now a national policy, spearheaded by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and formalized in the 2nd National Plan for Open Science.

What is open science?

Open science is a movement whose aim is to make the results of publicly funded scientific research (publications, data, codes and software, methods and processes...) accessible to all, without hindrance, without delay and free of charge.

More generally, open science corresponds to all scientific practices that promote the transparency, sharing and reuse of research throughout its life cycle.

Components of open science - source: FOSTER

The growing institutionalization of open science - source : Alain Marois

A national policy

The open science movement, which was born and developed in the 1990s-2000s, has become largely institutionalized in France over the past decade.

Today, it is supported and championed by both:

the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation via the national plans for open science ;
funding agencies, which require the opening of publications and as much as possible of the data and code produced as part of the projects they fund (example of the ANR);
research institutions and organizations that publish open science policies, charters and roadmaps.

What's at stake?

The importance attached to open science policies in higher education and research is explained by the need to find answers to several fundamental issues:

the accessibility of the results of publicly-funded research, in the face of ever-increasing subscription prices for the journal packages of major scientific publishers;
scientific integrity and citizens' trust in science, which must be supported by transparent, open and reproducible research practices ;
the effectiveness of publicly-funded research, which will benefit from greater openness favoring the reuse (and non-duplication) of research results, international collaborations and knowledge transfers.
The sustainability of the economic model for scientific publishing, in the face of the development of the author-pays model for open access publishing, which constitutes a form of conflict of interest and encourages the emergence of predatory, low-quality publishing.