Over 3,000 of you responded to our survey on the deposit suggestion service we launched last autumn. A big thank you to each and every one of you! The aim was to better understand your impressions of this new way of feeding HAL, to identify areas for improvement and to better meet your expectations. Your feedback helps us to improve the service: a new configuration criterion has been introduced to eliminate publications that you have not authored, and certain interface texts have been revised to remove ambiguities.
The deposit suggestion service identifies scholarly publications that are already openly accessible on other platforms and offers them to their authors in their personal space. If the user accepts the suggestion, the file is automatically imported with no further action required.
In 2024, 11,791 files were imported through this service.
A survey conducted in the autumn gathered the opinions of over 3,000 researchers who responded, with 44% having already imported at least one of their publications thanks to the suggestions. Another aim of the survey was to identify areas for improvement.
There was significant feedback on the issue of homonyms: it can be frustrating to receive suggestions for publications whose author is a homonym, especially if you have a very common name. The ORCID identifier is a filter that can be added in the service settings, but it must be present in the original metadata to be fully effective. The discipline associated with the user profile can also help to refine the suggestions, provided that this information has been filled in.
Your co-authors: Allies in filtering out publications by homonyms
How can you improve your experience of the Suggestion Service by eliminating as far as possible publications that you have not authored?
If you find that the suggestion service offers you publications by someone with the same name as you, you now have the option of activating an additional filter called “Co-authors”, available in the configuration screen. This filter uses the co-authors listed in the publications you’ve already deposited in HAL to better identify which of the suggested publications actually belong to you, thus helping to narrow down the list of suggestions.
However, its effectiveness depends on several factors, including the number of publications you’ve deposited in HAL and your co-publishing habits. Feel free to try this new option to improve your experience with the suggestion service.
The suggestion service takes into account the publications already present in HAL
Another observation resulting from your comments in the survey: the nuance between notice (deposit without file) and deposit with file is not necessarily assimilated. In fact, the interface indicates whether the proposed publication is already referenced in HAL (deposit without file) in order to add the file, which some respondents interpreted as a flaw in the service, encouraging the creation of duplicates.
In order to remove this ambiguity and the fear of creating a duplicate, the presentation text of the screen has been modified to be more precise and the term “Notice without file” has replaced “Notice present in HAL”.
The proposal service does indeed take into account the existing in HAL. It allows either to complete a reference with a file or to create the deposit with a file if the publication is not already referenced.
Summary of your answers to the questionnaire
Gathering feedback from researchers within the first few months of the service’s launch is essential to ensure that it meets their needs. A questionnaire was therefore sent at the beginning of September last year to 24,000 email addresses associated with user accounts that had already activated the service. It was open until 15 October. In total, 3,350 people completed the survey.
- 95.13% of respondents are authors of scientific publications. The three most represented disciplines were: social sciences and humanities (38.2%), life sciences (15.3%), and engineering (10.5%).
- 52% of respondents found the service fairly or very easy to use, while 30% did not give an opinion.
- 1,426 respondents (44.7%) have imported at least one publication using the service. Of these, 433 chose to upload their own file because the suggested file did not meet their needs. This confirms the usefulness of the pre-import file check and highlights the autonomy of users in managing their submissions.
- 68.93% are satisfied with the suggestions they receive – a rather positive result.
- 1,761 respondents have not imported any publications, mainly (76.43%) because they have not yet received any suggestions. 6.98% indicated that they were not the authors of the suggested publications.
The next step in development is to introduce a new component to the service by extending suggestions to all publications, so that researchers only need to upload their file.