Our commitments

Reflections on the opening of science at the University of Lorraine led to the first visible results as early as 2016 with the first seminar organised on the subject. It was also in 2016 that the Lorraine portal of the open archive Hyper Articles en Ligne (HAL) was opened. HAL, developed by the Centre for Direct Scientific Communication (CCSD) of the CNRS, was chosen by the University of Lorraine to deposit its publications after an in-depth examination of several other technical solutions in view of the needs of laboratories in Lorraine.

After two years that have allowed a certain appropriation of the tool, it is on September 25, 2018 that the Board of Directors of the University of Lorraine adopts HAL as the official bibliography of the university and introduces an obligation for its researchers to deposit the complete texts of their publications, in compliance with the loi pour une République numérique of 2016.

In order to support researchers in this process of opening up their research, a series of dedicated annual symposia was initiated on 11 October 2018 on the theme “Open Sciences: Experiences, Challenges and Perspectives” and then organized every year. Since 2023, the University of Lorraine hosts a Love Data Week in the beginning of March. All of our symposia can be browsed here.

At the same time, and in order to cope with the unsustainable increase in the cost of subscriptions to the scientific journal packages of the major publishers, the University of Lorraine has opted in 2018 to unsubscribe to the journals offered by Springer. The resulting savings were partly used to support a number of virtuous editorial initiatives in terms of scientific quality, openness and transparency.

As a symbol of this important commitment to Open Science, the University of Lorraine was the first French university to ratify the Jussieu Call for Open Science and Bibliodiversity in October 2017. It is also a member of the Coordination of French Universities of Intensive Research (CURIF), and, as such, is associated with the ratification in January 2020 by the CURIF of the Sorbonne declaration on the rights of research data. In the same spirit, the University of Lorraine supported the first two editions of the national Open Science Days: in 2018, as in 2019.

In order to pursue the opening up of its research, the University of Lorraine has appointed in 2019 an Open Science chargé de mission, in charge of defining and implementing the University of Lorraine’s policy in this area, with the dual objective of, on the one hand, developing the opening up of publications by the University’s researchers and, on the other hand, promoting the sustainability and sharing of research data.

The definition of the University of Lorraine’s policy is thus entrusted to its steering committee for open science, made up of representatives of researchers from all the University’s disciplines, the Documentation  Direction (DDOC), the Digital Direction (DN), the Human Resources Direction (DRH) and the Research and Valorisation Direction (DRV), the Director of the Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (Inist) of the CNRS, the Head of the Scientific and Technical Information Research Unit at CentraleSupélec, the Head of the scientific pole OTELo, the director of Éditions de l’Université de Lorraine and the director of the MSH Lorraine.

The steering committee created three operational committees responsible for implementing the policy it develops as closely as possible to the researchers.

The operational committee for research data (CODR) is placed under the responsibility of two research data administrators, one from the Documentation Direction and the other from the Digital Direction, as the aggregation of these two competences is necessary in this field. They are of course both members of the steering committee. This operational committee is the researchers’ single point of contact for any assistance they may require in the management of their data. It has a generic e-mail address: donnees-recherche@univ-lorraine.fr.

Beyond assistance to researchers, the CODR’s missions are to provide them with a favourable environment enabling them to best meet their obligations and projects in terms of managing their research data. To this end, it organises a series of training courses, dealing in particular with data management plans, a tool that is now indispensable for the conduct of research projects. He runs the ADOC Lorraine data workshop and the DOREL data repository.

The operational committee for open publications (COPO), under the responsibility of the Documentation Direction (DDOC), is in charge, on the one hand, of the animation of the University’s HAL portal and, on the other hand, of the development and transition towards open access to the University’s publications. Like the CODR, it supports researchers in their editorial projects, particularly in responding to national calls for tender. He can be reached through his generic e-mail address: copo-contact@univ-lorraine.fr.

The three operational committees naturally contribute to the organisation of the annual symposia, each in its own field of interest.

At the same time, the DDOC offers the training course Domptez la doc, in collaboration with the Research and Valorization Direction and the Lorraine College of doctoral schools. Nearly half of the modules of this training are dedicated to Open Science: they enable doctoral students and experienced researchers to understand the challenges of opening up science, the legal constraints and opportunities in this area, as well as the various technical solutions.

The transition of research to a more open and collaborative model, both in terms of researchers’ publications and the data generated by their work, was already a national and international goal in early 2020 and much earlier. This is reflected in the national plan for Open Science, published in 2018, the CNRS roadmap for Open Science, of 2019, and the European S plan, expected in 2021. Not to mention the outbreak of the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus-related COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, which, by requiring vital research efforts to create cures and vaccines, imposed stronger international cooperation coupled with an increased requirement for verifiability of results.

This proactive policy at national, European and even international level is reflected in a series of obligations to open up research linked to the funding that researchers can obtain. Examples include the National Research Agency and the European Commission, which require the design of a data management plan and the open access publication of research results. It is highly likely that these injunctions will increase, concerning, for example, the forthcoming expert appraisals by the High Council for the Evaluation of Research and Higher Education (HCERES).

Through its steering committee and above all its two operational committees, the main objective of the University of Lorraine is therefore to support its researchers in the development of their profession, which is likely to increase.

On the one hand, the dissemination of their most advanced work, their publications, should be as open as possible. The University’s HAL portal can be used for this purpose, with the support of a dedicated team from the Documentation and Publishing Direction. The operational committee for open publications will also be able to advise them on how to disseminate their work according to new, existing or future methods.

On the other hand, a culture and a policy of sustainability, sharing and valorisation of the data generated by researchers will have to be developed according to national and European policies in this field. The operational committee for research data already offers support through individualised training, but should propose, at the beginning of 2022, an integrated environment linking the new data repository of the University of Lorraine, the national and international thematic repositories, and open archives such as HAL.

To quote Bernard Rentier during the second National Open Science Days: “it will never be possible to harmoniously implement Open Science without a universal consensus on a new way to evaluate research and researchers”.

Our funding agencies, our evaluators, seem to have heard Bernard, pioneer of Open Science and author of the indispensable Open Science, the challenge of transparency. The criteria for evaluating research are changing from quantitative criteria based on the number of publications and their controversial impact factors to a more qualitative and open evaluation. The reflections are not yet complete, but the recent reform of the annual CNRS staff evaluation campaign (CRAC) taking into account only publications reported in HAL is a first step. The following are described in the CNRS roadmap for Open Science and in the recommandations made by the Conference of University Presidents.

It is the responsibility of the University of Lorraine to accompany its researchers in this evolution of the criteria that will guide their careers in the future by informing them, by offering them an environment conducive to the opening up of science, while ensuring the necessary coherence between international, national and local evaluation criteria.