Every year since 2022, BRGM has published its open science barometer in accordance with the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research’s standards to establish the share of scientific publications that are openly accessible at the national level.
This approach is part of BRGM’s general open science policy adoptée fin 2022.
The French open science barometer adapted for public institutions
The open science barometer is a set of indicators put in place by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR) in late 2022 to establish the proportion of scientific publications with open access at the national level.
The MESR has given organisations wishing to do so the opportunity to try out the tool, with each one having free access to the results of its own barometer, based on data from its scientific publications. The aim is to measure and compare the development of open science practices in France, using reliable, open data based on a shared methodology.
Key findings from BRGM’s open science barometer for 2024
The barometer published this year by BRGM reveals several key findings:
Increased access to BRGM publications
Publications in open access in 2024 have increased slightly by 2% compared to 2022 and 2023. This increase reflects a growth trend of 39 percentage points over 5 years.
How BRGM scientific publications are made available
A publication can be made available both in an open archive and on the publisher’s publication platform, with the latter being the main method of publication (60% of publications), although this is down on last year (68%). This approach to making publications available reflects a trend towards systematic open-access policies among some publishers.
HAL is BRGM’s main open archive
To facilitate open access to its publications, BRGM has joined the national HAL platform, via its HAL-BRGM portal. Seventy-three per cent of BRGM publications from 2023 were available on the platform in 2023. This rate has remained unchanged since 2019.
Systematic inclusion of theses in the HAL open archive
As part of BRGM’s doctoral programme, almost thirty theses are defended each year. A procedure has been implemented for monitoring theses and systematically archiving them in HAL as soon as they are published online on theses.fr. Uploading in HAL is now being done systematically, with an open access rate of 100% on HAL and on theses.fr for theses defended in 2023.
More frequently accessible data sets, but with room for improvement in terms of access
An internal procedure for organising data sets and open access archiving is now operational, and the proportion of data-producing authors doing this is now 60%, representing a continuous increase over the past 4 years.
