The Second RDA France Annual meeting was held on 13 September 2019 at CNRS Headquarters in Paris. The 2018 meeting had been held in the framework of the First Journées Nationales de la Science Ouverte (National Open Science Days) in December 2018. In 2019 RDA France organised its own meeting, with a set of co-located Workshops on 11 and 12 September. More than 150 people registered to attend the meeting, which was unfortunately disrupted by a strike of public transportation in Paris on the 13th. The plenary meeting on that day was hopefully webcasted live and we had about 50 participants in the room, and more than 80 on line.

The meeting had an opening and three sessions respectively devoted to the RDA status, its organisation and operations; its recommendations and products; and FAIRisation and certification. The brainstorming session had to be cancelled to give more time to the on-site participants, many of them coming from all over France, to catch their return train or flight. A set of follow-up actions was nevertheless decided.

The half-day Workshops included two sessions on Certification of data repositories (11 and 12 September, with a total of about 60 participants), and sessions on RDA for Newcomers, Health and Medical Research Data, and Dataverse for Data Repositories held on 12 September, with respectively about 30, 30 and 40 participants. The largest room booked for the workshops could hold 40 people, we had many more registrations for the Certification and Dataverse workshops. We were able to duplicate the certification session, but had to select the participants of the Dataverse workshop.

Meeting programme, Workshop programme – including all the slides presented during the sessions

The meeting was introduced by Sylvie Rousset, representing the CNRS Directeur Général Délégué à la Science Alain Schuhl, and Marin Dacos, Open Open Science Advisor to the Director-General for Research and Innovation at the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation. Sylvie Rousset presented the elements of the CNRS Open Science policy – the CNRS published its Open Science Roadmap a few weeks later (French version, English version). Marin Dacos presented the actions engaged by the Ministry in support to the National Plan for Open Science, which include supporting the RDA and its French chapter RDA France. The information about the national Open Science policy and activities can be found on the Ouvrir la Science (Open the Science) web site.

The first session was introduced by Ingrid Dillo, DANS, co-chair of the RDA Council. Hilary Hanahoe, the RDA Secretary General, presented the RDA status and activities, and Francoise Genova (RDA France/Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg) RDA France and its activities.

The second session was introduced by Francoise Genova, who presented the RDA recommendations in the data life cycle, a presentation reusing many slides from the Secretariat talk presented by Anthony Juehne during the Adoption session of RDA Philadelphia Plenary in March 2019. Three specific examples of recommendation and adoption were then discussed in more details, the Agrisemantics recommendation (Sophie Aubin, INRA), the adoption of Income Streams for Data Repositories by OECD (Ingrid Dillo), and the output of the Group of European Data Experts (GEDE) supported by the RDA Data Fabric Interest Group on PIDs: Controlled Assertions (Carla-Maria Zwölf, Observatoire de Paris). Francoise Genova also showed slides provided by the French RDA Europe Ambassadors, who had not been able to attend the meeting: Julien Barde, RDA EU Ambassador for Marine Sciences / Fisheries, Anne Cambon-Thomsen - RDA EU Ambassador for Health Sciences and for Research Ethics, and Sébastien Denvil - RDA EU Ambassador Earth Sciences / Climate modelling.

The third session begun by a round table on thematic, European and international activities on FAIRisation, with for the thematic activities Damien Boulanger from OMP (ENVRI-FAIR), Sophie Aubin and Odile Hologne (GO FAIR Food Systems Implementation Network); for the European ones Ingrid Dillo (FAIRsFAIR) and Francoise Genova (EOSC FAIR WG); and for the international ones Edit Herczog from RDA Council (RDA FAIR Data Maturity Model WG). Then two talks provided feedback from French repositories engaged in Core Trust Seal Certification, the IFREMER research organisation (Pierre Cotty) and the repository networks of the Data Terra Research Infrastructure (Aude Chambodut, EOST, Gilbert Maudire, IFREMER).

As a conclusion, feedback from the workshops led to propose to create three RDA France groups to deal with Certification of Data Repositories, Implementation of Data Repositories, and Public Health and Medical Research Data. It was later decided to call these groups “Groupes de Partage” (Sharing Groups). Two activities are proposed for the Certification group: a webinar of certification granularity (how to certify a network of repositories, or a repositories which hosts data from many different origins, each with its own processes and policies), and a workshop gathering the people who will be engaged in the Core Trust Seal certification process to exchange on their findings and practices.

The meeting was organised by Francoise Genova, Francis André and Isabelle Debano (CNRS DIST). It was also the occasion to warmly thank Francis André (CNRS DIST), who had been the co-lead of RDA France since its creation in March 2019, for his key role in RDA France success - he had just retired but attended the meeting.

We warmly thank the speakers and participants, who made the meeting and workshops a success, in spite of the acute logistics problems on 13 September. The active participation and contributions of our guests Ingrid Dillo, Hilary Hanahoe and Edit Herczog was particularly appreciated.