Research Data Sharing and Valorization

8Comparative Study of National Research Services

Hugo CATHERINE

Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, France

8.1. Introduction

Several countries have established national infrastructures for the dissemination and preservation of research data. As part of a working group of the Committee for Open Science, Hugo Catherine has carried out a comparative study of these infrastructures in seven countries. What are the objectives, missions and governance methods of these infrastructures? What are their business models? What are the main features and services? This chapter provides a summary of this study.

8.2. Framework, objectives and scope of the study

In line with one of the development axes of the national plan for open science, which aims to “structure and open research data” (MESRI 2018), the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur, de la Recherche et de l’Innovation – MESRI) attempted to “design a generic service for research data for which existing or future disciplinary repositories are not a suitable solution”.

To this end, in 2019 the Committee for Open Science (CoSo – Comité pour la science ouverte) entrusted a “feasibility study of a generic data hosting and dissemination service” to a team of experts led by Jean-Christophe Desconnets (IRD – Institut de recherche pour le développement), accompanied by the Datactivist society.

As part of this work, this study aimed to enrich the team’s reflection by drawing up ...