HALiance: a structuring and innovative project for HAL

HAL
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Written by Agnès Magron

The CCSD is officially launching its HALiance project, winner at Structuring Equipment for Research action (EquipEx+)*. The HALiance project will last five and a half years and aims at a major transformation of HAL (hardware and software infrastructure, technologies and services) while maintaining its current operation.

The HALiance project is intending to redesign HAL’s core services and align them with recommendations and excellence criteria defined by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research as part of the National Plan for Open Science and within the framework of international initiatives in favour of open science (COAR, EOSC, cOAlition S). It builds on the renewal of hardware and software infrastructure and aims to address  international challenges with regard to excellence, technological agility and reinforced interconnection.

The project will last five and a half years and comprises several work packages.

Two work packages are about the hardware infrastructure, which must be secured and adapted to a significant increase in data, and the software infrastructure, which will be deployed in a new application development environment.

Other two work packages are dedicated to metadata: the first intends to diversify the types of metadata and identifiers extracted from submitted files (for example, affiliations or funders) in order to automatically enrich HAL and optimize the alignment with reference databases, while the other is meant to organize and document the life cycle of bibliographic metadata imported to HAL with the goal of improving its traceability.

The development of new services is part of several work packages aimed at optimizing the use of HAL and its adaptation to new research practices:

  • Implementation of a new way of feeding HAL by the means of a selective publications’ harvesting (full text)
  • Link HAL to preprint review services and make clear the publication cycle
  • Link publications and their research data, in particular develop the interoperability with Nakala and Dataverse (e.g., Recherche.data.gouv).

Finally, more transversal work packages are dedicated on the one hand, to communication with user communities and their support, and, on the other hand, to ensuring consistency with FAIR principles, in particular via the Core Trust Seal certification process.

HALiance project is coordinated by the CNRS and the CCSD’s partners are INRAE, Inria and IN2P3. HALiance includes also working axes with the Equipex+ COMMONS project, led by Openedition, Huma-Num and Métopes: for instance, feasibility estimation and deployment of a shared authentication system.

The EquipEx+ HALiance is a structuring project for the CCSD. Its achievement is a major component of its roadmap.

* The French government, through its Investment programme for the future (PIA)3, invests in key scientific equipment and seeks to maintain the excellence and leadership of the national research. Fifty-two projects were thus selected for a total funding of €422 million as part of the Structuring equipment for research action: EquipEx+ (abbreviation of “equipment of excellence”).

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