National agreement with the publisher Elsevier: implementation of the imports in HAL (step 2)

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Written by Agnès Magron

The import into HAL of articles published in 2019 and 2020 in Elsevier journals, clause of the national licence agreement with this publisher, was done last December. This automatically feeds collections, institutional portals and CVs. The metadata of articles published more than 12 months ago contains the url to the accepted author manuscript (AAM) hosted on the publisher’s platform. An opt-out feature allows the corresponding author to revoke this link.

After the 2687 MAA added to existing records last October (see our previous post), the second step of the implementation of the agreement is done. It concerns :

  •  import of articles (metadata and MAA files) that were not present in HAL  and published in 2019. The number is estimated at 4627 articles,
  •  import of 5242 records of articles published in 2020. The metadata will contain a link to the MAA hosted on the Elsevier website.
What is the opt-out ?

The agreement foresees the possibility for an institution to revoke the url linking to the manuscript hosted on the Elsevier platform. The risk for HAL, which hosts more than 130 institutional portals, is to display different information depending the portal consulted by the user.
To avoid this, the steering committee of the CCSD (MESRI, CNRS, Inria, INRAE and CPU) has decided that this possibility is up to the corresponding author.
This solution, more complex to set up, guarantees a coherent reading contract: the user has the same information whatever the HAL portal he/she is consulting.

A functionality of opt-out is thus set up: the corresponding author needs to be connected to HAL and have the property of the deposit to activate it. As a reminder, to have the property of a deposit means that the user can modify the metadata and/or add a file. The contributor owns logically his deposit, as well as the authors of the document if they are of course users of HAL and have accepted the property of the deposit after notification. How to be sure that it is the corresponding author who makes the request? Well, everything is manual and it is the CCSD’s team which takes care of it and withdraws the link. It should however be noted that, if the url is no more present in the metadata, HAL will not be able to retrieve the MAA 24 months after the date of publication as the agreement foresees.

A collaboration with the users club Casuhal to check authors’ affiliations

Our previous post detailed the treatments carried out to import into HAL the data provided by Elsevier. The authors’ affiliations data requires an alignment with the existing data in AureHAL: the objective is to avoid a bad affiliation of authors during the import. Thanks to the Casuhal community which offered its help, a meticulous work of verification was carried out for the research structures of about thirty institutions that represents a little more than 4200 affiliations. The portals and laboratory collections are thus be correctly completed after import.

The national licence agreement with Elsevier has been signed for a period of 4 years (2019-2022): we will of course keep you informed of future deliveries.