The Open Science Plan for École des Ponts ParisTech
Contact : Romain Boistel

Summary

Open access to publicationsOpen Access to data

The École des Ponts ParisTech has been involved for nearly 10 years in the open access movement, with an institutional open access repository (HAL) and numerous awareness-raising activities for researchers. The dissemination of all research products (including publications, data and software code) is now subject to increasing incentives for greater openness, i.e. the systematic and toll-free online availability of scientific production.

The movement to promote open science and the political ambitions of École des Ponts on this issue are part of a context which is both:

  • more favourable: the 2016 Loi pour une République Numérique (Digital Republic Act) allows researchers financed at 50% by public funds to deposit their publications in open access after 6 months (STEM) or 1 year (SS), even if the publisher stipulates a longer embargo,
  • more coercive: the Plan S promoted by the main European funding agencies (including the European Commission and the ANR) will require from 2021 onwards open access to the articles they fund and the sharing of data as often as possible. Journals also increasingly require data to be shared.

In France, the 2018 National Plan for Open Science Plan defines a policy for promoting open access to publications and research data. A Research Integrity officer (and open science is a lever for scientific integrity) has been appointed in each higher education and research institution in France, and at École des Ponts ParisTech (2019). Finally, École des Ponts adopted a Mandate for the Sharing of Science (2017), and a decision to delegate to researchers the practical implementation of the dissemination of research data and software code (2018).

To know everything about Open Access
To know everything about research data 
Research integrity at École des Ponts

 

In this context, to make the existing actions carried out by the Scholarly communication unit more coherent and to further engage the institution in the opening up of science, an Open Science Plan is adopted. It is divided into two components: one related to the sharing of publications, the other to the sharing of data. It plans to implement specific means to achieve ambitious objectives for the outreach of the École des Ponts up to 2024.

 

Open access to publications

Goals

In accordance with the Mandate for the Sharing of Science adopted by École des Ponts in 2017 and to echo Plan S, the objective is to achieve a 100% rate of articles available in open access by 2024.

Resources

To achieve this objective, the Scholarly communication unit is in charge of the following:
  • to make researchers and doctoral students aware of their obligations and of the importance of sharing their publications,
  • to train École des Ponts doctoral students to good publishing practices and tools dedicated to the self-archiving of their work; this training is mandatory in the doctoral programme,
  • to conduct regular campaigns to identify publications that are not yet openly accessible and to implement technical processes to facilitate depositing in HAL,
  • to administrate the École des Ponts HAL portal.

 

Indicators

The current rate of open access articles (2015-2018) is 65%. This rate will be measured annually and published as part of the École des Ponts Bibliometric Report and Activity Report. It is calculated on the basis of open access articles via the publisher of the journal in which it is published (Gold road) or on the availability of a version deposited in an open archive (Green road).

 

Open Access to data

Goals

To comply with the legal context and the requests of funding agencies, and following the European Commission's motto "as open as possible, as closed as necessary", Ecole des Ponts is targeting sharing 100% of shareable research data produced within the scope of European projects or ANR projects.

Resources

To achieve this goal, the DR-Centre is responsible for providing the Scholarly communication unit with a list of projects carried out by Ecole des Ponts and funded by ANR or the European Commission. The Scholarly communication unit is in charge of the following:
  • to support researchers on the data section in their response to calls for projects and in the implementation of data management plans, requested by ANR no later than 6 months after the start of a project,
ANR is implementing a data management plan for projects funded from 2019 onwards
The templates (drafting frames) for Data Management Plans (or DMPs) for the ANR and European projects (ERC, Horizon2020) are available on Opidor
 
  • to organize workshops and training courses - mandatory in the doctoral programme - on data & code submission and licensing, and to share with researchers its knowledge about the legal context,
  • to participate in the working group on research data Committee for Open Science (Comité pour la Science Ouverte - CoSO) in order to be informed of legal and institutional developments and to pass on its work to the Ecole des Ponts labs.

Indicators

Publications are typically supported by data that feed and validate the results. To measure the data sharing rate, it will be assessed whether for each publication produced within an ANR or European project that is based on shareable data, there is indeed a deposit. This data openness rate will be published as part of the Bibliometric Report and the École des Ponts Activity Report.

 

The Open Science Plan will be included in the École des Ponts 2020-2024 Objectives Plan and both the publication and data sharing objectives will be declined annually to be achieved by 2024.