The Recherche Data Gouv system opens

The topic of data was already considered as early as 2020 in a report submitted to the French Prime Minister under the title For a government policy of data, and is now a subject increasingly perceived as strategic. This report pinned “the challenges regarding scientific data as factors of knowledge”. The report even stated that “if the culture of sharing between research teams had been better established, the handling and treatment of Covid-19 would certainly have been more effective and more responsive during the crisis”. Public authorities have therefore taken up this issue and have had “the ambition to respond in part to this strategic challenge by providing access to a national research data platform”.

The FAIR principles

According to the project’s creators, research today faces a major challenge: “safeguarding, sharing and opening up data to promote open, more transparent and more cumulative science at the service of all, research teams and society as a whole”. But research data management has become a critical issue, as it represents “a complex additional workload for research teams”.

As such, the value of research data is not sufficiently exploited or, worse, data is too often lost or unusable. This is why the Recherche Data Gouv system was designed to support research teams in their work of structuring data to make it easy to Find, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR).

Thanks to this new system, each stakeholder in the Recherche Data Gouv environment can contribute to the influence of French research through the sharing and opening of data. Eventually, Recherche Data Gouv could become a service of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), “offering access to the heritage of shared and open research data, in order to promote their reuse”.

The research.data.gouv.fr portal, more than just a portal

Included in this project, the Recherche.data.gouv.fr web portal provides access to the entire environment, and was also presented on 8 July. It contains information on the first services available, on the members of the environment, on the multidisciplinary warehouse and on the catalogue of research data, which already contains more than 21,000 shared data files.

More than just a portal, in the words of the ministry in charge of research, the recherche.data.gouv.fr website is “a showcase for French research datasets and an entry point for the research teams in the environment that contribute to the influence of French research through the sharing and opening of data”.

According to the government’s information website, Recherche Data Gouv represents “a sovereign solution to let French research keep the control over the data it produces”.