Unistra Open Science Monitor

What the OSM team points about for this new version at the national level applies more or less at the institutional level :

Indicators relating to publications, PhD theses, and software are more in line with stabilization trends (62% openness for publications, 76% for doctoral theses), with certain technical effects leading to recent developments being interpreted as a plateau rather than a real shift in practices.

The technical effects referred to are specified in the footnotes to the relevant graphs :

a break in the series has been identified in the Unpaywall data used to detect open access. Technical changes to this source have led to a uniform decrease in the indicator across all years tracked since 2013. In this context, the 2025 result should be interpreted as confirmation of a plateau rather than an actual decline in the openness of publications.

Our institution is affected by this plateau effect observed at the national level, although less markedly (which was already the case in the previous two years).

For our institution, the two indicators cited above by the OSM team are 73% (11 points above the national level) and 69% (7 points below the national level and declining year on year since 2020), respectively.

Open access

Publications in open access refer to publications from scientific research that are made available online in open access for all, without technical or financial barriers. The Unistra Open Science Monitor focuses on Unistra publications, i.e. publications where at least one of the authors is affiliated in the institution. It is therefore the activity of Unistra research that is taken into account. The open access rate represents the ratio of the number of open access publications to the total number of publications on the same perimeter (e.g. by year, discipline or publisher).
The generalisation of open access to scientific publications is one of the axes of the French national open science strategy, with the objective of a 100% open access rate in 2030. It facilitates, broadens and accelerates the dissemination of the results of research to scientific communities and to society in general: teachers, students, companies, associations, public policy actors, etc.

Version

This monitor is derived from the French Open Science Monitor (OSM), published since 2019 by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation. It measures the evolution of open access to publications in France or in an institution.
The present Unistra monitor benefits from the evolutions brought by the version 3 of the national OSM released in March 2023.

The contributions of this new version are the following :

• Taking into account of theses (extracted from the national catalog)
• Taking into account of new types of documents (beta version) :
  • Datasets
  • Codes and software
• Taking into account of the data without DOI (replaced by the identifier HAL or theses)

These evolutions take more into account the publications of humanities and social sciences (it was a limit of the previous versions of the OSM)

Note that some of these evolutions are in beta version (this is indicated at the head of the graphs)

Data sources and method

For the monitor of the University of Strasbourg, the data sources used are the Web of Science, HAL, PubMed, theses.fr and Works-magnet (this one is used for the datasets). Data sources and method follow the University of Lorraine recipe.

The previous source extractions were performed in February 2026.

• Therefore, the latest observation year is 2025
• The latest observed year is 2024
• The first publication year is 2016 (2013 for PhD Theses)
• The first observation year is 2018
• For PhD theses, you should consider as 2024 as the observation year since certain PhD theses are under embargo for one year after defense.

Enriched data are available in csv and jsonl formats here :

csv

json lines (this file contains all history data : OA status for each DOI and for each observation date)

Limitations

Since March 2023, the monitor has included certain publications that were previously excluded : publications without a DOI deposited in HAL, as well as dissertations.

These publications are identified based on the affiliations listed in HAL (that is, whenever a researcher listed in a publication is affiliated with one of the university’s research units).

It is worth noting that a new service is now available regarding the open science monitor : since the fall of 2023, it has been possible to generate a monitor at the level of a research unit, a laboratory, or a research team. This provides an opportunity to create barometers to self-assess the proportion of open-access publications.

In conclusion, the institution-level monitors in France are not comparable with one another. The sources vary from one institution to another. The monitor is not intended to pit institutions against one another. The goal is to provide indicators for self-assessment. This is an innovative initiative that uses open-source tools; the OSM is improved year after year.

Updates

There are two updates to consider :

• One deals with the data themselves : publications of all types published before January 1st following the last observed year i.e. January 1st 2026 (unless the annual update has been carried out) Next update is scheduled in March 2027 (the last observation year will be 2026).
• The other one deals with indicators observed for the previous data: indicators are updated every quarter (normally at the beginning of December, March, June and September). The date stays in each graph's footnote.