The steering committee was renewed in early 2026. It was joined by three elected representatives from the members’ council:

• Fabien Borget, Aix-Marseille University (also elected chair of the Members’ Council)
• Christophe Calvin, CEA
• Cécile Swiatek, University of Paris Nanterre

Learn more about the steering committee

Discover the governance of Recherche Data Gouv

The curation near you

Programmed as part of the french ‘Printemps de la Donnée’, curathons are locally organised collaborative events that address curation in an open way, without being limited to a particular repository or theme, even if the Recherche Data Gouv repository is particularly present. They are coordinated by an organising committee bringing together members of the ‘Centre de Ressources Plateforme’ (CReP), data management clusters and repositories that are members of the french Recherche Data Gouv ecosystem. They promote the sharing of practices, the development of skills and collaboration between the various actors involved in the management and valorisation of research data, and improve the overall documentary quality of datasets.

A collective launch of the day

Novelty of the year 2026: As a large number of local ‘curathons’ are scheduled for Tuesday 5 May, a common launch time will be proposed. The day will start with a 30-minute exchange session connecting all sites via videoconferencing. This moment will officially launch the day, present the objectives of the curathons and give some common benchmarks before the start of the local sessions.

Join the new edition: There is still time!

The following sites have already announced their participation in 2026: Avignon, Besançon, Grenoble, La Rochelle, Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Paris, Poitiers, Nancy-Metz, Nantes, Strasbourg.

A webinar will be held on Thursday 26 March 2026 at 3.30 p.m. to give all relevant information

• Would you like to join the event by organising your own curathon? The participation form and the guide are online: https://linktr.ee/curathon.
• The team will be present at the annual seminar of the Research Data Gouv ecosystem in Grenoble from 30 March to 1 April where it will hold a stand.
• For any question or request: curathon-comite-organisation[at]groupes.renater.fr

For their involvement in the organising committee, thank you: Anne-Sophie Bage (INRAE), Frédérique Gros (Progedo), Erwan Guillou (Inist-CNRS), Thomas Jouneau (University of Lorraine), Alena Lapatniova (Progedo), Lucie Marie (SciencesPo), Jennifer Palethorpe (University of Nantes), Rachel Prost (University Marie & Louis Pasteur), Cathy Tang (INRAE).

The Data Workshops are in geographical proximity to the research teams to provide them with initial expertise in the rational management of research data.

Details of the schedule for the 7th call:

• Call for proposals scheduled to open on March 9, 2026, closing on May 21, 2026.
• Meeting of new project leaders
• Call for proposals opens on June 1st, 2026, closing on July 3rd, 2026.
• Announcement of results October 2026

Reminder of application links

Applications for a new proposal will be made on the page: https://ami.dgri.fr/AteliersDeLaDonnee/

For applications submitted during a previous call, you can modify and complete your project on the page: https://interactions.dgri.fr/

Frédéric de Lamotte (INRAE, IFB), who contributed to the article, revisits each misconception to explain how the Research Data Gouv ecosystem is working to address these challenges and support researchers in applying FAIR principles.

⚠️ This article provides initial responses to common misconceptions. Please refer to the original article for full explanations.

1. I own my research data

This is not true for public research. The 2016 Digital Republic Act treats research data as public data when more than half of the work is funded by public funds...

Contribution from Recherche Data Gouv: Institutional spaces allow institutions to exercise their legal responsibility while facilitating the availability of data in accordance with FAIR principles and national sovereignty issues.

2. I can easily manage my data myself

False. Data management is a technical skill in its own right, just like statistical analysis, for example. It requires a wide range of knowledge: structuring, formats, metadata, documentation, data management plans, archiving, legal and ethical aspects, etc.

Contribution from Data Gouv Research: The ecosystem structures a comprehensive network of competence centers: data workshops and institutional reference centers for local support, thematic reference centers for disciplinary expertise, and resource centers offering guides, tutorials, and training. Researchers can thus rely on key functions related to research data, such as data stewards, data curators, etc.

3. Data management has a major environmental impact

True and false. Data management consumes energy and its impact depends on how the data is organized and stored...

Contribution from Recherche Data Gouv: The platform promotes the centralization and structuring of data, limiting unnecessary duplication. The national repository pools infrastructure and encourages good documentation practices, which prevent each researcher from keeping their own duplicate version of the same data.

4. Having the data alone is enough!

False. Without metadata, data is unusable. Metadata provides the context necessary to understand, interpret, and reuse a dataset. 

Contribution from Recherche Data Gouv: The platform imposes metadata standards upon submission and provides detailed methodological guides for documentation. The Research Data College has published a checklist of actions to be taken to implement metadata management and traceability. Tutorials guide researchers step by step through the process of describing their data.

5. Implementing FAIR is too expensive and time-consuming

False. While the initial effort of documentation and structuring may sometimes seem significant, studies show that it is the absence of FAIR principles that generates the highest costs...

Contribution from Recherche Data Gouv: The ecosystem drastically reduces entry costs by offering a shared national infrastructure (trusted repository, automatic DOI assignment, metadata validation) . Free virtual classes (submitting a dataset, FAIR curation, managing a collection, etc.) quickly train teams. The referencing of disciplinary repositories guides users towards appropriate solutions, avoiding costly errors.

Key takeaway: Recherche Data Gouv transforms every preconceived notion into an opportunity: legal clarification, expert support, environmental optimization, quality assurance through metadata, and cost reduction through pooling. The ecosystem does more than just respond to challenges: it makes data management a lever for scientific performance, serving open, reproducible, and sustainable science.

Learn more about Recherche Data Gouv

Join the ecosystem
 

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

Read the online press release “Isabelle Blanc appointed Director of Digital Technology at the Institut Curie”

The fifth edition of "Data Spring" will take place from March 24 to June 25, 2026. It aims to continue highlighting the various local initiatives surrounding the production, sharing, and reuse of FAIR data

 within an open science context. You can already submit your activities (events, peer feedback sessions, use cases, etc.), regardless of the target audience. You can propose your events at any time, but the sooner you do so, the greater their visibility will be.

Data management and reuse, FAIR principles, artificial intelligence, and data from citizen science: these are just some of the topics that can be addressed!

Find all the events already scheduled in the 2026 calendar.

Listen again to the events (in french) from the previous edition on the Canal-U channel, "Data Spring."

This metadata catalog from the National Biodiversity Data Hub gathers and displays metadata harvested from the largest repositories and catalogs within the national community, in connection with major international programs.

Its objective is to facilitate the discovery of research datasets dedicated to biodiversity sciences.

In practical terms, a user can build a corpus of datasets from numerous sources - from both research and public policy - through a single search across a collection of over 13,000 metadata records, covering all levels of biological organization, from genes to socio-ecosystems.

The PNDB's semantic engine, based on a language model developed by Mistral, significantly simplifies the researcher's process. The scientist simply describes their needs in their own words (for example, by pasting a summary of their research project) for the platform to identify and suggest the most relevant datasets. The search can then be refined using filters based on the parameters found in the retrieved metadata records.

Each record provides the metadata for the corresponding dataset and, in most cases, direct access to the data files.

Access the (french) PNDB online metadata catalog

It provides a simple and adaptable framework for harmonising practices and ensuring the quality of research data.

See the online resource Facilitating data documentation through metadata in a research project

These sessions focused on:

• Skills4EOSC's vision and objectives for structuring skills to support the EOSC;
• the integration of FAIR by Design methodology principles into the design of educational resources;
• an overview of the training courses offered by Skills4EOSC;
• and the training of data stewards, from the Minimum Viable Skillset to the Skills4EOSC curriculum.

Integrating Skills4EOSC training into the Recherche Data Gouv competence centers is a key lever for aligning national practices with European standards, strengthening research data skills, and providing sustainable support for research communities.

Watch the replay of these Skills4EOSC workshops on the Recherche Data Gouv Canal U channel (in french)

"Designed to be practical, clear, and immediately actionable, the online resource "Deleting Data: Why? Which Data?" will help you understand the issues surrounding data deletion and what questions to ask yourself when deciding whether to keep or delete data. It also helps you implement concrete actions to better organize what should be kept… and what can be deleted with complete peace of mind", excerpt from the relevant news in french disseminated by DoRANum.

This resource is the result of a collaboration between the DoRANum Resource Center and the French Institute of Bioinformatics (IFB).

Access the online resource in french "Deleting Data: Why? Which Data?"