What is open science?
Open science is a new paradigm that has emerged in the digital age in which It aims to democratize the dissemination and exchange of scientific knowledge. Its goal is to remove publicly funded research from the limited framework of closed databases. Concretely, this amounts to To make the results of scientific research, whether they are publications or data, available to all free of charge and without delay, in order to promote scientific cooperation, while respecting confidentiality and ethics.
The primary motive is that arrive to Research should not be limited to more developed countries And broad openness serves the common interest of all. The health crisis that we have experienced and are still experiencing shows how important it is to reach results and respond quickly to effective response and limit harmful consequences.
Open science promotes international cooperation. © Royyimzy – Fotolia.com
Transparent and civil dynamics
The open science challenges are well recognized at CEA:
- Increases the quality and transparency of research by allowing unhindered access to more information,
- encourages reuse of data in order to enhance research results and accelerate innovation,
- It leverages scientific integrity and helps re-establish a relationship of trust among citizens in science.
Among the themes developed by Open Science, two are particularly important, relating to the openness of publications and data.
What are the French and European initiatives to encourage open science?
For a few years now, The open science movement has grown in scale, and is promoted by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation As well as by many French and European program agencies. For example, Horizon Europe shows open science as a political priority. The application of open science rules, regarding the allocation of public funds in project calls, is enhanced, requiring researchers to have free immediate access to scientific publications and, when possible, to research data. This policy has also been formalized since September 2018 at S plan., supported by cOAlition S, which brings together several national funding bodies, including ANR.
How is CEA involved in this process?
CEA has been involved in the open science approach since 2008, when the organization selected the national HAL platform as an open institutional repository. To ensure long-term archiving and international visibility of its scientific publications. Over the past ten years or so, actions in favor of open science have been multiplied and organized internally, within a Steering Committee for Scientific and Technical Information that I chair and that includes the various departments of CEA. At the end of May 2021, the CEA Open Science Charter was signed by the Director General, François Jacques. The latter encourages the organization’s researchers to publish research results and data, according to the European principle of “as open as possible, closed as necessary”.
CEA therefore requires its researchers to submit their manuscripts of acceptable articles to HAL-CEA, within a period not to exceed 6 months after publication in a scientific journal.
The entire challenge of open science is to persuade publishers of major scientific journals to participate in this movement, by reducing the ban periods on articles as much as possible or granting researchers-authors the right to publish in open access. A copy of their articles. We are moving with other research organizations and universities so that researchers retain their rights to results and data and can reallocate it, particularly through our work within Koberin Consortium.
The idea is to be able to juggle open science with publications in prestigious journals that are often highly protected through expensive subscriptions to commercial publishers.
For many years, CEA has been managing large data sets within the framework of international cooperation (climate, astrophysics, genomics, etc.). Based on this experience, CEA is also working on the methods and conditions for the collection and storage of all its research data, in relation to projects implemented by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research. innovation.
Finally, one of the effects of open science has to do with the methods of evaluating researchers who will have to take these developments into account in research. Thus, the use of the journal impact factor no longer necessarily appears relevant to new open science paradigms, and the openness of data produced under research projects is an element to be incorporated into the assessment.
What are the CEA Open Science Scale scores?
67% of 2019 CEA science publications are open access, according to CEA’s 2020 Open Science Barometer [1] . A figure higher than the national average, which reflects the dynamics of accelerating open science within the organization for two years.
HAL is a leading archiving platform with more than 9,000 scientific articles submitted by researchers between 2016 and 2020. For CEA, openness to publications and data is very important in certain areas of basic research, particularly in basic biology (81%) and mathematics (81 %) and physical sciences and astronomy (74%).
[1] The Open Science Scale, published by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MESRI), provides a set of indicators to measure the share of scientific publications in open access at the national level. The data and code of this barometer can be freely reused, and the University of Lorraine has adapted it. Building on this work, CEA developed its Open Scientific Scale.
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