French research simplification policy through Persistent IDendifiers

Both the second French National Plan for Open Science and the Higher Education and Research Ministry data road map, published in 2021, explicitly mention the use of international persistent identifiers (PIDs), like ORCID and ROR, to strengthen the researchers digital identities and extend the reach of their work. Recently, the Ministry’s data road map played a role in designing a policy for administrative simplification that relies on better data circulation. This method relies on PIDs, which are the world’s unique way to connect researchers, research outputs, institutions, and grants. The policy has two major objectives: reduce administrative burden and track research engagement and impact. A plan to effectively adopt PIDs will be designed in 2024 by representatives from French research organisations, funders, assessors, national IT and IST specialists, and international PID providers like ORCID and DataCite. In parallel the Ministry has decided to support OpenAlex, the fully open bibliographic database. The adoption of PIDs in conjunction with the support to OpenAlex, shapes the third objective : research information openness, as the Barcelona Declaration states it. However, redirecting an organisation data curation efforts from closed proprietary databases to OpenAlex hinders the quality of the former, and the rankings they enable, potential causing reputational damage to the organisation. In summary : administrative burden reduction, research productions precise tracking and information openness can be enhanced by the same move if the link to the need for open information based institutions ranking is evidenced and publicised.