Open science moves forward in France in the wake of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought open science into the spotlight, encouraging a wide range of significant initiatives across disciplines and countries.

In France, one of the five EOSC-Pillar countries, an emergency fund of €50 million was released by the Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, as the Ministry of Solidarity and Health is giving priority to applied research efforts, from diagnosis to treatment through the psychological impact of the epidemic, for both patients and caregivers.

In an effort to facilitate the work led by research actors, the circulation of all scientific information is being encouraged to allow decisive progress, in particular concerning the improvement of patient care. In this context, the government requested free and public access to publications and data from research related to the COVID-19 pandemic in France.

In order to ensure the immediate dissemination of the results, the promoters of the projects selected under the latest national calls will have to make their data and their results available to the public.

Open Science and COVID-19

These are the main actions requested from researchers:

• Early dissemination of results via open prepublication platforms.
• Deposit accepted full-text publications on an open archive. Publication in open access journals is strongly encouraged.
• Share protocols and provisional and final data in accordance with established rules such as GDPR.
• Set up a “data management plan” with updating and transmission to the financer.

More generally, data will have to adhere to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), as all publications should be made available to the public, in all disciplines which can feed research into COVID-19.

EOSC-Pillar's sister project EOSCsecretariat.eu has recently launched a fast-track procedure for funding open science activities related to COVID-19, learn more and apply at this link.

Read more about the French government's plan here (in French)