“You are not alone; research data is a collective adventure.” Isabelle Blanc
As Isabelle Blanc, founder of Recherche Data Gouv, takes on new responsibilities at the Curie Institute, she looks back on this collective adventure that began in July 2022.
You founded Recherche Data Gouv. What is your most vivid memory of the birth of this ecosystem?
What stands out most in my mind is the moment when I realized that Recherche Data Gouv was not just seen as a simple technical data warehouse project, but as a collective movement involving many players and institutions in higher education and research, who were joining forces to build a shared national warehouse and local support systems for research teams.
I am thinking in particular of the first meetings where researchers, engineers, librarians, and laboratory managers from completely different institutions and scientific backgrounds took ownership of the idea and began to transform it.
This shift, when Recherche Data Gouv became a common good supported by an entire community, was the defining moment for me. It was at that moment that I realized we weren't just creating another service, but a dynamic capable of uniting and sustainably changing the way science is built and shared.
What impact has Recherche Data Gouv had on the practices of the French scientific community?
Recherche Data Gouv has first and foremost helped to establish the idea that data is an integral part of the research cycle. Recherche Data Gouv has helped to give a visible, recognized, and structured place to data management, documentation, and dissemination, thereby recognizing the invisible scientific work carried out in research units.
In concrete terms, it has had three major impacts:
- Acculturation: it has facilitated the development of research teams' data management skills, thanks to local support, thematic reference centers, and the dissemination of best practices.
- Structuring: it has promoted the implementation of data management plans, the use of standards, and a more mature approach to data quality and preservation.
- Sharing: it has helped to standardize the storage, sharing, and reuse of data by the teams that produced it and by others.
In short, it has helped the community move from a “I keep my data to myself” mindset to a “I build sustainably with and for the community” mindset.
After years of working with research teams, what message would you like to send them today about research data?
I would like to tell them: your data is immensely valuable, often much more than you realize, and it can be reused over time if you document it as soon as it is created.
They are scientific objects in their own right, fundamental building blocks for accelerating knowledge, enabling new discoveries, and enhancing the transparency of science, since they constitute proof of scientific knowledge. Managing, documenting, and sharing your data is not an additional administrative burden. It is a scientific, ethical, and strategic investment. This work, which can sometimes be invisible and time-consuming, helps to make our research more robust, more reproducible, and more useful to society. And above all: you are not alone. A whole community of supporters is there to help you move forward. Research data is a collective adventure. I would like to thank everyone who is involved and helps to promote Recherche Data Gouv.
Looking back on these nearly five years, what conclusions do you draw from the Recherche Data Gouv adventure, and what do you see as the most promising challenge for the future?
The results are very positive: we have collectively structured a national ecosystem, trained hundreds of teams, provided a clear framework, and, above all, firmly established the issue of data at the heart of research practices. Today, no one doubts that data is an essential scientific asset.
But the adventure is only just beginning. In my opinion, the major challenge for the coming years is to go further in terms of interoperability and the ability to circulate data between disciplines, infrastructures, and countries. This involves working on standards, metadata quality, data management automation, and training and recognition of scientific data-related functions.
In short, the future will depend on our ability to transform data into a fluid, living, and reusable ecosystem that serves a more open, faster, and more collaborative science.
Discover the 2026 governance of Recherche Data Gouv