France has played an important role in the European open access movement, particularly in the launch of the Berlin declaration.
Among French research structures, the research institutions (CNRS, INSERM in particular) played a major role at the beginning of the 2000’s, especially with the launch of the HAL open archive in 2001.
France has a national plan for the implementation of Open Science.
In addition to that, many initiatives have been taken nationally and at the institutional level to support OA:
- In October 2016, the French Law for a Digital Republic Act (LOI n° 2016-1321 du 7 octobre 2016 pour une République numérique) came into force. One article is of specific concern for scholarly communication, as it relates directly to open access/open data. Article 30 is about Open Access and creates a new right for researchers which creates a legal right for authors to archive an OA copy, even if they have granted an exclusive right to a publisher. See the details here: https://blogs.openaire.eu/?p=1602
- The Jussieu Call for Open science and bibliodiversity was launched in October 2017 and already signed by many major institutions.
23 French institutions have open access mandates requiring that authors self-archive their papers in their own institutional repository.
The ANR has issued an open access policy in November 2007, strongly encouraging the deposit of funded publications in open archives systems and in HAL in particular. It is worth noting that the Humanities and Social Sciences department has adopted a stronger policy mandating systematic deposit of publications in HAL-SHS.