Building an Academic OSPO: Practical Governance Lessons for European Universities
In September 2025, the Université Grenoble Alpes became the first French university to officially launch its OSPO.
Situated at the intersection of research labs, higher education, and the public sector, academic institutions face a unique set of challenges, constraints, and opportunities when working with open source and open science. Building on their real-world experience, Violaine Louvet (CNRS, Université Grenoble Alpes) and Boris Baldassari (Eclipse Foundation, OSPO Alliance) teamed up to develop practical guidelines and recommendations for academic OSPOs, extending the OSPO Alliance’s Good Governance Handbook with field-tested feedback.
In this session, we will present this new paper, outline the key specificities of academia, and share actionable best practices to plan, build, and deploy an OSPO within research and higher education entities. This talk is tailored for anyone interested in open source and open science within European universities, regardless of their current progress or maturity level.
Boris is a long time open source enthusiast and contributor. Previously a methods and tools consultant for the industry, then a software engineering researcher, he joined the Eclipse Foundation in 2021 to help people and organisations adopt, understand and apply open source principles and best practices to their projects. He has also been a maintainer of the OSPO Alliance since 2021. He lives in Europe.
Violaine Louvet is a CNRS research engineer at the Jean Kuntzmann Laboratory of Applied Mathematics in Grenoble. She is a member of the Source Code and Software College of the French Committee for Open Science and a Software Heritage ambassador.
She is deeply involved in open science at the University of Grenoble Alpes (https://scienceouverte.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/), particularly through the OSPO of the University.