The French Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR) has published its full report on the state of scientific and economic production or technology transfer of software from public research. The report was commissioned by the French Parliament, overseen by France’s Ministerial Administrator of Data, Algorithms and Codes (AMDAC) and follows a study led by Professor Pierre Boulet, a computer scientist and the University of Lille’s Vice-President for Digital Infrastructures. A national quantitative survey was run in spring 2023 to ask all public research units about the software produced by their teams. The questionnaire concentrated on the characteristics of the software developed and the technology transfer strategies used to take it further. It also included qualitative interviews with the technology transfer departments of national research organisations, universities and schools as well as SATTs (Technology transfer companies) and other technology transfer subsidiaries of the organisations surveyed. 

The report gives an overview of French public research software production based on the four phases of the software life cycle: 1) design, funding and development, 2) usage, 3) protection and property rights, 4) dissemination and exploitation.

The report confirms that software is being actively created in all research disciplines and not just computer science. It also found that over two-thirds of the software produced by French public research is used internationally (69%). Such software is also used outside the academic sphere (30%) which reflects its socio-economic impact. Open source licences have been widely adopted (69%) to promote collaboration and the dissemination of results. Proprietary licences were also found to be regularly adopted (10%). 

The report then identifies the issues and prospects for software production, particularly:

1. Supporting researchers in constructing explicit governance systems for their software (which need to be maintained over time) and developing a scientific and economic exploitation strategy for such software;
2. Promoting the dissemination of software by reinforcing the adoption of best development practices like collaborative maintenance systems, user and contributor documentation, code archiving, and so forth;
3. Succeed with the dual objective of opening up sources codes to disseminate software and of promoting software economically with the right licences. 

Following on from this report, the MESR has now launched initiatives to promote best practices for the development and usage of software from higher education and research by involving the Committee for Open Science’s Software and Source Codes College.

In September 2023, a summary of this report was submitted to the French Parliament and also published on this website. This summary version has now been updated following the publication of the full report.

Find out more:

• The main report
• The summary version of the report