Inra: A charter for the open access to publications and data

Inra (the French National Institute for Agricultural Research which owns Annals of Forest Science among a number of research journals) just released its “Charter for the open access to publications and data” which describes the policy the institute develops in support of open access. This policy follows 7 main guidelines:

1. Open access to the information produced by publicly funded research programs is the general rule and every effort nateeds be devoted to that goal.
2. Inra commits to organise the management and valuation of the scientific information it produces; all publications from the institute will be vailable via the institutional portal ProdInra,  connected to the repository HAL; similarly, data will be managed and data papers published whenever suitable; support to researchers will be provided on a dedicated portal.
3. The inter-operability of all scientific information produced will be a major goal to ensure their re-use: all informations produced by Inra will follow international standards.
4. Open access to publications and data will conform to international rules and legal regulations.
5. Assessment of the production of researchers and engineers of Inra will base only on the productions available within the ProdInra archive.
6. Inra warrants long term storage and protection of digital information.
7. Costs for open access and long term storage of information will be covered by the research projects.

Annals of Forest Science contributes actively to this policy:

1. Papers published in the journal are made freely available on HAL, 12 months after their publication, with the active help of the Publisher Springer-Nature;
2. Annals of Forest Science publishes data papers; the first examples are available online;
3. Annals of Forest Sciences changes its data policy (see the next blog post ).

These important steps are in line with the Charter, which text is available here in French.