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  • Press release

Open Science Barometer: Sorbonne University, Top French University In Terms of Open Access

Open science is one of the four strategic axes of Sorbonne University's institutional project. In order to measure the effects of this policy, the institution has chosen to apply the Open Science Barometer (BSO), implemented by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR), at the local level. This barometer measures the evolution of open access and publication practices in the research community. On a national scale, the rate of open access publications measured in 2021 is 62%.

The open science barometer applied to Sorbonne University publications shows that 78% of its publications published in 2020 were open access in 2021. This rate has increased by 10 points compared to the previous year (2020) when 68% of publications published in 2019 were open access.

These results confirm the analysis of CWTS Leiden Ranking, which attributes a rate of 79% of publications in open access to Sorbonne University for the period 2017-2020, thus positioning it as the French university with the highest rate of open access.

The open access rate for publications from the research structures of the Faculty of Science and Engineering reaches 88.8%; nine laboratories of this faculty reach open access rates between 95 and 100%.

HAL, the first open archive used by the research community

More than two thirds of the 2020 publications are in open access in an open archive (green path). HAL is by far the most used platform by the Sorbonne University research community: it hosts 43% of the 2020 publications. The HAL portal of Sorbonne University displays nearly 230,000 references, including more than 96,000 in full text. These figures show the effects of the national policy in favor of open science, the encouragement of research funders to publish in open access as well as the institutional commitment of the university and its research teams.

Sorbonne University's Open Access Policy

  • 2019: Charter for open access to publications in which staff commit to deposit their articles and conference proceedings in full text in HAL.

  • 2020: Policy of valuing actions for open science in the internal evaluation of research, in which Sorbonne University commits to taking into account, as a priority, criteria related to the intrinsic quality of research and open science, including open access publication.

All the graphs of the Sorbonne University open science barometer can be found on the page Commitment to Open Science (Barometer section.)