Assigning a DOI identifier to French doctoral theses is part of the national open science strategy. The project has been entrusted to ABES by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Space and is being carried out in partnership with the CCSD. The CCSD will assign DOIs to versions of theses deposited by authors in HAL, HAL-theses or an institutional repository.
As the project also covers retroactive processing, approximately 150,000 theses are now identified with a DOI. For current submissions, the process of assigning a DOI is integrated into the STAR application used by institutions to manage the national deposit of electronic theses.
If the institution has opted for open access dissemination via HAL-Thèses, the application will automatically import the thesis into the open archive. Since 2009, nearly 111,000 doctoral theses have been imported, representing around 66% of all theses in HAL-Thèses. Updating deposits with DOIs assigned by ABES has already begun and will be rolled out gradually (e.g., https://hal.science/tel-05268357v3). Therefore, there is no need to modify your deposits.
Jury-validated version vs. author-deposited version
This workflow applies to the version of the thesis that has been validated by the jury and submitted by the institution for the national deposit. However, authors can control the timeline for open access dissemination by depositing their own version in HAL-Thèses, HAL or one of the 153 institutional portals as soon as their defence is complete. Self-archiving is not limited to French theses.
The CCSD’s role in the DOI assignment national project focuses on the self-archived versions. This means that each author version of a thesis will be identifiable and citable with a DOI. The DOI assigned by CCSD will follow the format: 10.46298/{HAL identifier}v{version}, for example: 10.46298/tel-00000001v1.
Retroactive processing is also planned, with an estimated 60,000 deposits set to be updated. For new submissions, the DOI will be assigned at the time of publication on HAL.
Versioning is a critical concept for theses and is addressed in the deduplication feature available to portal administrators. If both the author’s version and the jury-validated version exist in HAL, they are not considered as duplicates. Instead, versions are prioritised, with the version validated by the jury always displayed first.
As part of the project, CCSD received €19,850 of funding to purchase DOIs from CrossRef, the chosen registration agency. Implementation in HAL is scheduled for the end of the first half of 2026.
This national project to assign DOIs to theses is more than just a technical measure — it is a strategic tool for boosting the international visibility of French doctoral research. Standardization increases the impact of doctoral work, thereby reinforcing France’s position in global research.