2025 marked a pivotal year for institutional portals. Three institutions that had previously managed their own local open archives began their transition to HAL, adopting the HAL portal as their sole institutional repository. Such decisions are often driven by technical obsolescence, financial constraints, and the desire to participate in a national collaborative effort. Since HAL was created, several other institutions have already followed suit. As HAL celebrates its 25th anniversary, let’s reflect on the long-term shift towards shared infrastructure.
In 2025, the University of Lille, the École nationale supérieure d’arts et métiers (ENSAM), and the University of Strasbourg each decided to switch their open archive infrastructure to HAL’s portal solution. Lille and ENSAM already had a HAL portal, which now serves as their exclusive institutional repository, while the University of Strasbourg launched its portal just last year. In 2026, the University of Bordeaux followed suit.
Each of these three institutions had previously established workflows to transfer some of their content to HAL. However, the full transition required both data migration and enhanced team support.
As we celebrate HAL’s 25th anniversary, let’s look back… Several other institutions had also chosen to phase out their locally developed open archives, making their HAL portal the sole institutional repository and gradually reshaping the national landscape. All of these institutions were already contributing content to HAL, and most also had a HAL portal in place.
Okina, the University of Angers’ open archive, was the first of this kind. Launched in early 2015, its deposit function was deactivated at the end of 2019, the same year the institution opened its HAL portal —now its sole institutional repository.
Even older, the Prodinra archive, created in 2006 by INRA (now INRAE), was permanently shut down in May 2020 due to its outdated technological infrastructure. When INRA merged with Irstea in 2019, the migration of the Irstea archive was included in the project. The migration project lasted nearly two years. INRAE joined CCSD’s governing bodies in 2018, contributing both funding and development resources. Its goals included fostering HAL’s expansion, as pooling efforts helps reduce development and maintenance costs. With reinforced teams, new features were developed and rolled out to the entire HAL user community. The HAL-INRAE portal officially launched in March 2020.
Launched in 2008, SPIRE, Sciences Po’s open archive, was migrated to HAL in 2021. According to the user guide, one reason for this transition was that HAL had become “essential for meeting the requirements of research evaluation and funding bodies (HCERES, RIBAC, ANR, ERC).” The portal definitively replaced SPIRE in October 2021.
In 2023, another archive—also launched in 2008—closed: OATAO, operated by Toulouse INP. The HAL portal of the University of Toulouse, established in 2011, expanded its scope to become the shared portal for the University, the INP, and the Université de Technologie Tarbes Occitanie Pyrénées (UTTOP).
While these strategies address technical and financial challenges, they also simplify the daily lives of researchers working in multi-supervised research environments. As highlighted in the report on the closure of the Lille archive: “The coexistence of two archives can be confusing for researchers, despite available guidance. This is even more true when research units receive different recommendations from their supervising institutions, some of which are strongly involved in HAL.”
HAL occupies a unique position in the international landscape of open archives, which is largely dominated by locally deployed institutional platforms or major thematic repositories. Its model is built on a shared national infrastructure that serves the entire academic community while allowing each institution to maintain its own dedicated, customizable space, known as a “portal.” HAL’s approach stands out: while many countries either host numerous independent institutional archives or rely on international platforms, France’s national strategy early on promoted HAL’s shared model. Today, HAL represents a network of over 150 portals.