France's open science strategy is bearing fruit

An integral part of the French strategy

As part of its roadmap on data, algorithms and source code policy, the Ministry of Higher Education and Research is implementing measures to promote open science, namely the unhindered dissemination of scientific research results, methods and products in France. To this end, it is following a National Plan for Open Science (currently in its second edition), introduced in 2018 by the Digital Republic Act adopted in 2016.

The ANRS MIE, along with other research funding agencies (ANR, Anses, Ademe, INCa and FRM), is actively participating in this initiative as part of a joint approach and an exchange network set up in 2020 in conjunction with the Committee for Open Science (CoSO). As a result, in 2024, approximately 66% of articles published by French researchers will be open access (compared to 37% in 2018).

In accordance with Inserm policy, ANRS MIE is developing and implementing an open science strategy promoting immediate open access to the scientific publications it helps to fund and coordinate, and the sharing of research data that is ‘as open as possible, no more closed than necessary’. This policy is reflected in particular by the deposit in the HAL national open archive of the full text of scientific publications resulting from projects funded by ANRS MIE and support for an open access publication model that is free of charge for researchers, based on the

Very positive outcomes

Given this context, the open science office of the scientific journal PLOS (itself open access on the basis of free licences) considers French policy to be among the most ‘progressive’ in this area and a ‘leader’ in terms of bibliometric monitoring of open science. France ‘made for a promising cohort to measure the effects of open science practices,’ according to the management of PLOS.

Based on the corpus monitored by the French Open Science Barometer, researchers from the PLOS Open Science Office sifted through 576,537 French open access publications published between 2020 and 2022. The result? On average, these are cited 8.6% more than restricted access articles. In addition, articles sharing source code are associated with 13.5% more citations, those sharing data with 14.5% more citations, and articles published as preprints are referenced 19% more than articles with restricted access and no preprint.

This statistical analysis – the first of its kind at the national level – also highlights specific characteristics according to discipline. Among those studied by ANRS MIE, an open access study sharing data in medical research (a field representing just under a third of the French corpus) is associated with a 34.9% increase in the number of citations. A study in fundamental biology is associated with 25.3% more citations than a similar study with restricted access, when pre–published in open access.

ANRS MIE’s commitments

In 2025, ANRS MIE continued its efforts, in particular to promote the accessibility of information and encourage the sharing and reuse of research data.

With more than a hundred international institutions, including the ANR, a partner in the network of French funding agencies (Ademe, ANR, ANRS MIE, Anses, INCa and the Foundation for Medical Research), ANRS MIE definitively signed the Barcelona Declaration in April 2024. This declaration stems directly from the conclusions on open science reached by the Council of the European Union, then chaired by France, in June 2022, and from the establishment of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA).

Through this declaration, ANRS MIE has committed to:

• Make openness the default rule for the research information it uses and produces;
• Collaborate with services and systems that support and enable access to open research information;
• Support the sustainability of open research information infrastructures;
• Support collective actions aimed at accelerating the transition to open research information.

ANRS MIE is also carrying out in-depth work, in collaboration with the methodology and management centres (CMG), to guide the agency’s future data sharing and reuse policy. The main objectives of this work are:

• To identify technical constraints;
• To establish common archiving procedures;
• To define a data access policy and procedures.

Finally, more specifically, ANRS MIE has updated the ‘Promotion of open science’ section of the regulations governing its calls for projects, strongly recommending the use of the ‘structured’ data management plan template available on the OPIDoR DMP portal and the standard template for clinical projects it sponsors, specifying the requirements for data openness.