The French Digital Republic Law has undoubtedly impacted the open access dissemination of scholarly articles. But did you know that it has also increased the transparency, circulation and reuse of information produced by government agencies? It has effectively generalised the open data approach by requiring the online publication of numerous documents that are already accessible to anyone under existing access rights.
It is within this framework that the platform documentation-administrative.gouv.fr was launched.
The platform was officially launched in December 2021, initially limiting access to documents from the Prime Minister’s Office. This year, it is being opened up to all ministries.
The platform has four objectives:
- to share knowledge with as many people as possible;
- to increase the transparency of public action;
- to enable the reuse of textual data;
- and to preserve documents in a sustainable and secure manner.
The platform is managed by the Prime Minister’s Administrative and Financial Services Department.
It currently hosts and distributes almost 1,400 full-text documents under an open licence, including 467 reports which could be valuable sources for research.
The use of HAL’s technological base
Why is this topic being addressed on this blog? Simply because the platform was co-developed in partnership with the CCSD and the Prime Minister’s office selected HAL for its technical features and robustness.
In practice, documentation-administrative.gouv.fr is essentially a replica of HAL. It uses the same software base as HAL and relies on the CCSD’s infrastructure for hosting servers and data, with a specific database adapted to administrative documents.
Compared to the bibliographic model used in HAL, the metadata schema is simplified and the reference data is specific, whether concerning document types or administrative structures (ministries, commissions, directorates, etc.). There are no scientific domains, only 12 general public themes ranging from the Organisation of the State to Agriculture, including Education and Justice.
The HAL model favours the pooling of resources and thus adapts to the objective of disseminating administrative documents produced and held by state services.
Benefits for HAL
The documentation-administrative.gouv.fr platform is smaller than HAL, which allows the CCSD to test solutions before deploying them on HAL.
In order to comply with regulatory provisions relating to the IT security of government information systems, a security audit was conducted as part of the platform’s deployment. This audit enabled infrastructure improvements, including improved cookie management, the implementation of ‘tarteaucitron’ to simplify cookie management and ensure GDPR compliance, better controls over user input and corrections to security vulnerabilities.
Finally, a second audit, this time focusing on digital accessibility, identified numerous areas for improvement. For the public part of the interface (i.e. unconnected users), these corrections increased the level of compliance from less than 30% to over 70%.
The CCSD receives funding to develop documentation-administrative.gouv.fr, covering the costs of application maintenance, hosting at the IN2P3 computing centre, and archiving at CINES.
The partnership with government departments for the documentation-administrative.gouv.fr platform helps to ensure the sustainability of the infrastructure and acknowledges the expertise of the CCSD. This affirms the CCSD’s legitimacy as a key player in open access to public information in France, extending far beyond the academic sphere.