National Open Access Desk

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.

Promote open access to publications

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.

Contribute to open research data wherever possible

Coordinate efforts at the national, European and international levels

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.