France has a long tradition of open science, and this is being reflected in the country's enthusiastic participation in EOSC-related initiatives. After the publication of the national Open Science plan, which explicitly includes the participation in the EOSC, in summer 2018, the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MESRI) is now putting in place a Coordination committee for services and e-infrastructures, with a special focus on the EOSC.

As part of this activity, a national working group has been created including the main French EOSC stakeholder organisations and the ministry to advance the coordination of EOSC related activities in France. One of the tasks of this group is to propose the mandated organization for France in the newly-established EOSC Association.

In parallel, a process of identifying the key e-infrastructures in the French computing landscape is ongoing. The goal is to determine national and regional computing and data storing facilities, which are the crucial elements of the computing and data treatment effort for research and higher education in France. 

While the National Computing Center for Higher Education CINES is providing technical coordination to EOSC-Pillar, the National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics of CNRS (IN2P3) leads the project's activities on Use Cases and Horizontal Data Storage & Computing Services.

Suzanne Dumouchel (CNRS) was elected as one of the directors of the EOSC Association at the first General Assembly in December 2020. Read our interview with her at this link.

If you are part of a French Open Science initiative and want to learn more about EOSC, check out the EOSC-Pillar Ambassadors Programme.

Roadmap for consolidating National Initiatives

Within the EOSC-Pillar project, the so-called "Transversal Task Force" conducted a series of interviews to further gain insights into the national landscape, analyzing the status of National Initiatives and specifically of Mandated Organisations in the realm of the EOSC Association.

The full report, completed Oct 2021, is available here.

Legal and Policy Framework and Federation Blueprint

Within the EOSC-Pillar project, Work-Package WP4 compiled a thorough study of the legal and policy state of the art in the involved countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy), identifying commonalities and gaps or challenges, and proposing recommendations for researchers on the rules and procedures with respect to legal issues regarding open access, open data, and cross border data access.

The full report (last update, Sep. 2021) is available here, while an excerpt containing details on Open Science Regulations and Policies, National copyright laws, Personal data protection laws in France is available here

EOSC Observatory

Check out the EOSC Observatory, a policy intelligence tool being developed by the EOSC Future project for monitoring policies, practices, and impacts related to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). It will support the EOSC community in tracking the implementation of EOSC and the policy makers in developing actionable policies.

EOSC Steering Board Representative: 
Volker Beckmann, Ministry of Higher Education and Research and Innovation (MESRI)
EOSC-Pillar partners: