The French National Fund for Open Science’s first activity report provides a summary of the work carried out over the 2019-2021 period covered by the first National Plan for Open Science.

The National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) set up in 2019 is one of the first major achievements deriving from the First French Plan for Open Science. It is a scientific interest group managed by the CNRS’s Open Research Data Department. Its governance has been entrusted to a Steering Committee made up of the heads of France’s main higher education and research institutions and chaired by Claire Giry, the Director General of Research and Innovation at the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation.

During the 2019-2021 period the Fund collected 12.3 million Euros mainly provided by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research and French higher education and research organisations and institutions. It intervened in three main areas:

• the organisation and funding of two calls for projects promoting open scientific publishing and editing;
• support for national and international Open Science infrastructures such as HAL, the Research Data Alliance, Software Heritage, OpenCitation and so on;
• funding the Recherche Data Gov ecosystem which the Fund has committed to supporting until 2023.

The FNSO is a core tool for Open Science policy and is continuing to diversify its interventions to respond to the objectives set out in the second French Plan for Open Science.