Baromètre Français de la Science Ouverte

Overview

The Baromètre Français de la Science Ouverte (BSO, also known as the French Open Science Monitor) is an open-data dashboard developed by the French ministry responsible for higher education and research to track the progress of open science practices across French publicly funded research. Launched in 2019, it measures and publishes annual statistics on open access to publications, open research data, and open source software, providing the empirical evidence base for French open science policy under Ouvrir la Science. Its indicators serve as the general indicators of the French Open Science Strategy for 2026-2033, and its work forms part of the Open Science Monitoring Initiative (OSMI), which began in France and is now developed with UNESCO and other partners to harmonise open science monitoring indicators internationally. It is built entirely on open data and open-source methodology, with all code publicly available, making it a model of open science applied to open science monitoring itself.

Headline indicators

Figures reported in the French Open Science Strategy of September 2026, from monitor data updated in December 2025 and, for clinical trials, in June 2026.

• 61% of publications are open access, a rise of 24 points in eight years.
• 27% of publications shared their data and 21% their software, rises of 9 and 4 points in four years.
• 76% of defended PhD theses are open access one year after the defence.
• 48% of clinical trial results from public sponsors are shared within three years.

The strategy reads the open access figure as a plateau rather than a decline, because a break in the Unpaywall series used to detect open access lowered the indicator across every year monitored.

What It Measures

The BSO tracks open access to French scientific publications, measuring rates by year, discipline, publisher type, and funding source, with a breakdown by access type (gold, green via HAL, hybrid, bronze) and compliance rates with ANR Open Science Policy mandates. It also measures the proportion of French publications with associated open data statements and tracks deposits in Recherche Data Gouv and discipline-specific repositories. For software, it monitors open source publication rates and Software Heritage deposits. For clinical research, it monitors the rate at which trial results are reported.

Technical Implementation

The BSO uses Unpaywall and OpenAlex for publication open access status, HAL metadata for French repository deposits, DOI resolution for publication identification, and DCAT and Dublin Core for dataset metadata. All source code: https://github.com/dataesr/bso-publications (publications) and https://github.com/dataesr/bso-ui (interface).

Institutional Adaptations

The BSO methodology has been adapted by individual institutions to create local open science monitors. BSO3 is an institutional version deployed at universities and research organisations including Inserm, CNRS, and Sorbonne Université. Institut Pasteur has its own local adaptation. ANR runs one for its funded publications. These local monitors feed into the national BSO aggregation, and the 2026-2029 action plan continues the ready-to-use service that lets an institution adapt the monitor to its own context.

Connections

• isPartOf: Ouvrir la Science (empirical evidence base for French open science policy)

Resources

• https://frenchopensciencemonitor.esr.gouv.fr
• https://doi.org/10.52949/94 (French Open Science Strategy, Annex 2.2 on monitor indicator trends)
• https://open-science-monitoring.org (Open Science Monitoring Initiative)
• https://github.com/dataesr/bso-publications (source code)