In 2021, the Institut Pasteur produced a Charter for Open Access to Publications. This charter is part of a broader commitment to open science, as reaffirmed in the 2019-2023 Strategic Plan.
In its 2019-2023 Strategic Plan, the Institut Pasteur confirms its long-term strategy to "promote open access to publications and research data." In 2021, in line with this commitment, it published a Charter for Open Access to Scientific Publications. In the charter, the Institut Pasteur calls for all its scientific publications (research articles, reviews, letters, books, conference papers and preprints) to be published as open access from 2021 onwards.
Participation in open science is also one of the criteria taken into consideration when assessing scientists and research engineers. All publications for the period under assessment must be submitted to HAL-Pasteur, the open archive for Institut Pasteur publications.
Many research funding bodies, including the European Commission and the French National Research Agency (ANR), require any publications derived from projects they have funded to be made available as open access. To ensure compliance with these open access policies, the Institut Pasteur's scientists are asked to:
- Submit their publications to the HAL-Pasteur open archive.
- Publish with a CC-BY Creative Commons license and no embargo, in other words make articles available free of charge as soon as they are published, so that they can be read and reused by anyone.
For the latter requirement, there are two possibilities. Publications can be published in a fully open access journal or by applying the Rights Retention Strategy. This strategy was developed by several research funding bodies that have joined forces in cOAlition S.
Using the algorithm provided by the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation to calculate the open access rate of French publications, the Institut Pasteur has published its open science barometer. As of July 2021, 85.1% of the Institut Pasteur's publications published in 2020 were available as open access.
The Institut Pasteur's commitment to open science began in 2004, the same year as the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge. This strategy to promote open access to publications is in line with France's National Plan for Open Science and with ambitions at international level. The aim is to democratize access to the results of honest, quality research and to speed up innovation by facilitating the reuse of results.
In 2021, the Institut Pasteur also pledged its commitment to another area of open science by adopting a policy for managing and sharing research data and software codes.
