About HAL

HAL is a multidisciplinary open archive for the sharing of published and unpublished research. It is at the service of researchers in academic institutions, both public and private. In France, HAL is the national archive chosen by the scientific and academic community for the open dissemination of its research results. The repository is also at the service of researchers affiliated to foreign academic institutions, whether public or private.

HAL is both:

• a software,
• a unique and multidisciplinary repository (see domain list),

• and a shared platform for

  • more than 140 institutional archives of universities and research organizations,
  • an open repository dedicated to Human and Social Sciences (HAL-SHS),
  • an open repository for the dissemination of PhD thesis,
  • and an open repository for visual and audio data (MediHAL).

It is aimed at researchers and their institutions, covering all scientific fields and the different types of documents produced by research (articles published in peer-reviewed journals, conference papers, theses, preprints, software, etc.).

Initiated by the physicist Franck Laloë in 2001, HAL is developed by the Center for Direct Scientific Communication (CCSD), a support and research unit under the supervision ot three public research organisations, the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Inria et INRAE. It is supported by the two national Plans for open science and is a research infrastructure certified by the ministry. It is an important axis of the open access institutional policies (see also the place of HAL according the French open science monitor).

HAL is registered in the Directory of Open Access Repositories OpenDOAR, and in the Directory of Open Access Preprint Repositories (DOAPR).

See also HAL, open archive built in common to share and disseminate scientific knowledge (political declaration, june 2022)

Governance¶

The shared and inclusive governance is open to all HAL partner institutions and internationally-oriented. It comprises 4 bodies: a Steering Committee, an Orientation Committee, a Partners’ Assembly and an International Scientific Council.

Business model¶

Funding is based on recurring support from the Ministry and the supervisory bodies of the CCSD, annual contributions from partner institutions using the portal service, and project funding.

HAL is free of charge.

CCSD¶

The CCSD pilots the HAL infrastructure. It provides hardware infrastructure management, software development and application maintenance. It provides a service for responding to user requests and supports them by organising training. It performs regular PIDs alignments with other repositories (ORCID, ROR, IdRef) and data cleaning.