France has played an important role in the European open access movement, particularly in the launch of the Berlin declaration, a cooperation between the Max Planck Society and people from the CNRS. French research institutions (CNRS, INSERM in particular) played a major role in early 2000, especially with the launch of the HAL open archive in 2001.
France also set forth an important initiative regarding open access journals with the Revues.org platform founded in 1999 and specialized in Humanities and Social Sciences. It is operated by a joint service unit bringing together the CNRS, two universities (Aix-Marseille and Université d’Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse) and a grande école (EHESS). Revues.org hosts more than 465 journals, 192 of them being fully open access. Universities and grandes écoles joined the open access movement gradually and it is worth noting that some universities have been working on open access publishing (Nice with the database Revel) and Open Archives (in Toulouse for instance) since 2003. After the signature of a national agreement in 2006, aiming to foster OA, some universities and grandes écoles established an institutional open archive. As of 2017, 95 of them do have an institutional repository. Couperin also facilitates this movement through a working group focused on open access. The movement is progressively growing and for example, the Jussieu call shows a real concern of the research community on OA issues.
SOS-DMP: is a directory of the services who support the writing of data management plans within universities and research organizations.
Dedicated OA website for researchers: easy to read information, FAQ on the digital Republic Law.
Doranum: dedicated website for researchers for research data: synthetic and clear information on research data.
DMP OPIDoR helps French researchers to write Data Management Plans.
Cat OPIDoR: wiki on the services dedicated to research data.
As part of the ANR’s contribution to the promotion and implementation of open science, and in line with the National Plan for Open Science, the funded project coordinator and partners must undertake to submit the scientific publications (full text) resulting from the research project to an open archive, either directly in HAL or via a local institutional archive, in accordance with the conditions in article 30 of the French “For a digital republic” act. In addition, the ANR recommends giving preference to publication in open access journals or books.
At the national level
The Agency works with members of the wider French research and innovation community (funding agencies, research bodies, alliances, etc.) to better define and coordinate efforts to promote open access to publications and data. The ANR is represented on the steering committee of the Committee for Open Science’s permanent secretariat.
At the European and international levels
The ANR is also involved in various cross-border initiatives, where it upholds France’s position in favour of open science and bibliodiversity. It is a member of cOAlition S, which brings together several funding bodies to accelerate the transition to full and immediate access to scientific publications, and it supports the Plan S. The Agency is also a member of the French GO FAIR office.
18 repositories are listed in Re3Data.
On July 4 2018, Frédérique Vidal, Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, launched the national open science plan.
The plan is centered around three key commitments:
The National Plan for Open Science are part of France’s international commitment, and aims at making 100% of French scientific publications in open access.
In October 2016, the French Law for a Digital Republic Act (LOI n° 2016-1321 du 7 octobre 2016 pour une République numérique) came into force. One article is of specific concern for scholarly communication, as it relates directly to open access/open data. Article 30 creates a new right for researchers where authors have the right to archive an OA copy, even if they have granted the copyright to a publisher.Details can be found here. Some national OA agreements have been signed or are being discussed with French and major global publishers (see below).
A nation-wide effort, coordinated by the ABES, to mandate depositing of ETD has been made. This initiative is supported by a dissemination portal for French thesis: http://www.theses.fr/. Furthermore TEL, developed by HAL, gives access to PhD thesis via self-archiving: https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/. A decree makes the submission of the electronic thesis mandatory for all institutions from 1 September 2016.
HAL, Dissemin and Couperin have worked together to enable Dissemin to be compatible with HAL. Dissemin detects papers behind paywalls and invites authors to upload them in an open repository in one click.
Every two years Couperin together with national stakeholders organise a national event on open science to advance OA policies and display best practices. Two dedicated websites gather the programmes and presentations that have been made. E.g.:
The Jussieu Call for Open science and bibliodiversity was launched in october 2017 and has already been signed by many major institutions.
OpenEdition books
31 books have been made open access by library funding through an initaitive led by OpenEdition, Knowledge Unlatched and Couperin.
Couperin, the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, some universities and professors have worked together to build an open access electronic textbook in History. The textbook will be available in October 2020.
SOS-DMP: is a directory of the services who support the writing of data management plans within universities and research organizations.
Dedicated OA website for researchers: easy to read information, FAQ on the digital Republic Law.
Doranum: dedicated website for researchers for research data: synthetic and clear information on research data.
DMP OPIDoR helps French researchers to write Data Management Plans.
Cat OPIDoR: wiki on the services dedicated to research data.