Recherche Data Gouv is France’s national ecosystem for managing, preserving, and sharing publicly funded research data. Inaugurated on 8 July 2022 by the French Minister of Higher Education and Research, it is not a single repository but a federation: a central platform for depositing and discovering datasets, paired with a nationwide network of “competence centres” embedded in universities and research organizations that help researchers actually manage their data day to day. It sits alongside Germany’s NFDI (Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur) as one of the two largest EU-member-state attempts to build country-wide research data infrastructure from the ground up, and both were built around the same underlying problem: FAIR data principles and funder mandates for data sharing require infrastructure and staffing that no single university can provide alone.
What Recherche Data Gouv is
Recherche Data Gouv (literally, roughly, “Research Data Government/State”) is the operating name for France’s national research-data infrastructure, run under the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research as part of the country’s Second National Plan for Open Science. It was formally inaugurated in July 2022 by then-Minister Sylvie Retailleau, following selection of its founding partner institutions by the Open Science Steering Committee (Comité pour la science ouverte) earlier the same year.
Rather than centralizing every French dataset in one government-run system, Recherche Data Gouv coordinates a distributed network: institutional and disciplinary repositories keep operating locally, and the national layer provides shared infrastructure, a common catalogue, and a support network so that researchers without institutional-level data support are not left without a route to FAIR-compliant deposit and sharing.
How the ecosystem is structured
Recherche Data Gouv is generally described, including in its own materials, as having two main components:
- A central platform — a web portal combining a repository, a searchable catalogue, and discovery tools for datasets, positioned as the default landing place for data that doesn’t already have a home in an institutional or disciplinary repository.
- A national federation of competence centres — support units that help research teams with the practical work of data management and dissemination. These are organized in three complementary ways: geographically (regional/institutional “data clusters,” pôles de gestion des données), by discipline (thematic reference centres aligned with specific research fields), and through dedicated resource centres offering cross-cutting expertise (legal, technical, and methodological). As of the ecosystem’s first year, roughly a dozen data clusters had been selected by the Open Science Steering Committee, with an initial group formally labelled and others on a pathway toward full labelling.
On top of this, the repository layer itself is plural by design: researchers can deposit in the Recherche Data Gouv repository directly, in their own institution’s repository, or in a recognized external repository (discipline-specific infrastructures such as those trusted under CoreTrustSeal, or general-purpose services such as Zenodo), with the national catalogue designed to index and surface all of them rather than force consolidation into one system.
Governance and France’s open science strategy
Recherche Data Gouv exists because of policy, not just infrastructure demand. France’s open science policy is set out in successive National Plans for Open Science; the plan in force when Recherche Data Gouv launched (the second, covering 2021–2024) made data, algorithms, and source code a explicit pillar alongside open-access publications, and named a coordinated national data infrastructure as one of its concrete commitments. Recherche Data Gouv is the implementation of that commitment. Its progress is tracked publicly through the French Open Science Monitor (Baromètre français de la Science Ouverte), and its coordinating body, the Open Science Steering Committee, is the same national committee responsible for the broader open science plan — so Recherche Data Gouv should be read as one operational arm of a wider national policy rather than a stand-alone technical project.
This mirrors, at a policy level, the position CASRAI content elsewhere describes for funder and journal data-sharing mandates generally: a data management plan is only as useful as the infrastructure available to actually execute it, and Recherche Data Gouv is France’s answer to the infrastructure half of that equation, distinct from any single funder’s DMP requirement.
Recherche Data Gouv vs. Germany’s NFDI: two models for national RDM infrastructure
Research administrators comparing national RDM programs across Europe will notice Recherche Data Gouv and NFDI solve the same problem with different organizational logic:
- Origin and structure. NFDI grew out of a competitive, discipline-led consortium model funded primarily through the German Research Foundation (DFG), with individual consortia bidding for status discipline by discipline. Recherche Data Gouv was launched top-down as a single named national ecosystem under the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, with a labelled network of competence centres selected by a national steering committee rather than consortia competing independently.
- Unifying element. NFDI’s coherence comes from a shared federation of legally independent discipline consortia. Recherche Data Gouv’s coherence comes from a shared platform and catalogue that indexes data wherever it is actually deposited.
- What stays local. Both models deliberately preserve local and disciplinary repositories rather than forcing migration to one system — the national layer in each case is additive infrastructure and support, not a replacement for institutional data services.
For a research administrator supporting international or comparative projects, the practical takeaway is the same in both countries: check whether a relevant discipline-specific or institutional service already exists before defaulting a French or German dataset to the general national platform, since both ecosystems are explicitly designed to route data to the most appropriate home first.
What it means for research administrators and data stewards
For anyone supporting French-affiliated research, or international collaborations with French partners, Recherche Data Gouv is the first place to check for:
- Where to deposit data generated under a French national or institutional grant, when no discipline-specific repository is mandated by the funder or journal.
- Who to contact for practical data-management support — the competence-centre network exists specifically so that researchers at institutions without dedicated data-steward staff still have a route to help with data management planning, formatting, licensing, and deposit.
- How French data-sharing obligations connect to broader EU open-science policy — Recherche Data Gouv is positioned as France’s national contribution to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) landscape, so metadata and repository choices made through it are intended to remain interoperable at the European level, not siloed nationally.
Administrators working across multiple European national systems may also want to see CASRAI’s guides on France’s other national research infrastructure and identifier bodies — including HCERES (research evaluation), ANR (national funding agency), IdRef (national researcher identifier), and Couperin (open-access licensing consortium) — since Recherche Data Gouv operates alongside, not instead of, these bodies.
Frequently asked questions
Is Recherche Data Gouv mandatory for French researchers?
There is no single blanket mandate forcing every French dataset into the Recherche Data Gouv repository specifically. What is increasingly expected, under France’s open science policy and many funders’ own data-sharing requirements, is that research data be made FAIR and, where appropriate, openly shared — Recherche Data Gouv is the infrastructure built to make that practical, not a separate compliance obligation layered on top.
Who operates Recherche Data Gouv?
It operates under the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, coordinated nationally through the Open Science Steering Committee, and delivered in practice through a distributed network of university- and research-organization-hosted competence centres rather than a single central agency running everything directly.
How is Recherche Data Gouv different from a single repository like Zenodo?
Zenodo is a single, discipline-agnostic repository. Recherche Data Gouv is a national ecosystem: it includes its own repository option, but its main structural contribution is the competence-centre support network and a catalogue that indexes data across many repositories — institutional, disciplinary, and general-purpose — rather than requiring all French research data to live in one place.
Does Recherche Data Gouv provide data management plan (DMP) support?
Data management planning support is one of the practical services the competence-centre network is built to provide, alongside help with formatting, licensing, and choosing an appropriate repository — researchers should check with their institution’s or region’s designated centre for the specific tools and templates it currently recommends, since this layer of the ecosystem is still maturing.
How does Recherche Data Gouv relate to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)?
Recherche Data Gouv is positioned as France’s national node contributing to the EOSC vision of interoperable, federated research data infrastructure across the EU — the same broader role Germany’s NFDI plays for European interoperability from its own national base.
