The Open Science Research Data and Open Science Free Software awards were part of the second National Plan for Open Science announced by the Minister for Higher Education, Research and Innovation on July 6^th 2021. They are intended to reward emblematic initiatives in this field.

The awards will be presented in early February 2022. More details of the Open Science Research Data award are given below.

As the Second National Plan for Open Science reminds us, “the actions involved in managing, preserving, opening up and sharing data also contribute to the progress of scientific research. They make it possible to share the effort of collecting data within the scientific community, and to consolidate and multiply the results of using them.”

Scientific communities around the world have implemented numerous initiatives to open up and reuse research data. France is playing a role in this ecosystem of actors notably through its support for the Research Data Alliance (RDA), an international network which defines best practices in the field of research data.

The Open Science Data Award will reward the efforts of teams and young researchers implementing best practices in structuring, describing, interoperating and enhancing the visibility of research data along with research projects based on data produced by other researchers.

The Open Science Data Award will therefore have several categories corresponding to these different practices:

• Open Science Data Award – “creating the right conditions for reuse” category. Among other things, this category could reward teams that implement one or more of the following elements (non-exhaustive list):
  • “FAIR by design”: application of the FAIR principles right from the data acquisition phase and throughout the data lifecycle;
  • DMP-Activatable;
  • Creating/enriching/preparing “reference datasets”;
  • Enhancing the visibility of data: ensuring the intelligibility of data sets outside the research field in which they originated.

• Open Science Data Award – “reuse of data” category which will reward the approaches of young tenured or non-tenured researchers who have opted to reuse data in their projects rather than creating or re-acquiring data.

• Open Science Data Award – jury’s special prize category to provide an opportunity to showcase ideas and projects that are exemplary in terms of opening or sharing data. The jury gives candidates carte blanche to present the projects they think should be put in the spotlight.

All of these prizes will reward the exemplary and innovative character of data preparation and reuse practices particularly involving data at the frontiers of several disciplines. The award is open to all disciplines and types of data (survey data, observation data, experimental data, analysis data, imagery, images, computational data, etc.).

The application process will open at the start of October and details will be given about how to apply.

Please don’t hesitate to share this information widely to help the projects you consider deserving of recognition get involved!