HAL: a public, sustainable and responsible infrastructure
HAL is the multidisciplinary open archive chosen by the entire French scientific and academic community for the dissemination of knowledge. It is part of the Ministry’s roadmap for research infrastructures and the National Plan for Open Science. It is both an application, a unique repository, and a shared platform for institutional archives, thematic open archives and theses.
HAL is a rich corpus of millions of documents, produced in the context of scientific research and higher education. The platform guarantees access and long-term preservation of these documents and offers a range of services that contribute to their enhancement.
Founding principles
- an OAI infrastructure ensuring interoperability,
- a stability of identifiers (URL of deposits in particular),
- a preservation of documents thanks to a partnership with CINES for archiving,
- a scientific quality of documents deposited as well as the details describing them: all deposited documents are therefore checked before being put on line,
- a time stamping of deposits guaranteeing the paternity rights of the text deposited,
- listings available via the AURéHAL platform, interoperable with other listings.
International interconnections with the main archives
- arXiv: automatic transfer of a HAL deposit to arXiv at the request of the depositor,
- Europe Pubmed Central,
- RePec,
- OpenAIRE: visibility of publications associated with a European project.
Interconnections with publication or recommendation services
- Episciences
- Peer Community In (PCI)
20 years’ experience providing services to researchers, research professors and PhD students
- self-archiving, single repository for storing their publications,
- deposit suggestions service,
- author identifier and CV,
- browsing statistics and downloads,
- interconnection with CRAC and RIBAC researcher activity reports (CNRS researchers).
Collections to raise the profile of the publications of a particular team, research centre or project
- customisable website,
- simple extraction of publications, browsing statistics and downloads.
Service to institutions: portal offering
The HAL portal is a public service offering representing an economic solution for creating and managing an institutional archive. Through HAL’s portal function, any institution (research organisation, university, group of universities, grandes écoles and so on) can manage the scientific output of its researchers and research professors.
HAL-SHS
HAL-SHS is the specific open archive dedicated to humanities and social sciences. Since 2016, it has held and distributed over 100,000 documents (full-text, images and videos).
Proposed to the scientific community in January 2005, HAL-SHS was created jointly by CCSD, the Institut des Sciences de l’Homme and the University of Rennes 2, with the support of the CNRS Humanities and Social Sciences department.
27 disciplines
Archaeology and Prehistory / Architecture, space management / Art and art history / Biological anthropology / Business administration / Classical studies / Cultural heritage and museology / Demography / Economies and finances / Education / Environmental studies / Gender studies / Geography / History / History, Philosophy and Sociology of Sciences / Law / Library and information sciences / Linguistics / Literature / Methods and statistics / Musicology and performing arts / Philosophy / Political science / Psychology / Religions / Social Anthropology and ethnology / Sociology
10-year anniversary study day
Held on 18 December 2015, a study day organised jointly by INSHS and CCSD looked back at the 10 years since HAL-SHS has been in use. The program, the communications and the videos are available on the conference website.
HAL theses
Created in 2001, HAL theses is dedicated to the self-archiving of theses and HDRs (accreditations to supervise research). Like HAL, it is multi-disciplinary and available to any user who has defended his/her thesis, irrespective of his/her university.
Theses are highly important documents which must be valued as essential vectors of scientific communication, an expression of research activities in universities and references for young doctors’ careers.
Authors can deposit their work in HAL, or directly in HAL theses. The date and time of the deposit are displayed and the deposit has a unique identifier in the form of tel-00000000 and a persistent url.
All authors can use the specific function offered by HAL to create their CV, which will be automatically updated with their subsequent publications if they are also deposited in the archive.
A research centre or institutional portal can also raise the profile of theses produced by creating a collection.
HAL theses and STAR
STAR is a national application, managed by ABES, used by theses defence institutions to deposit defended theses in digital form. STAR acts as an intermediary for institutions that have chosen HAL theses to disseminate their theses by importing metadata and files into the archive.
HAL theses and DART Europe
DART-Europe is a partnership of research libraries and library consortiums working together to improve global access to European theses. As a partner, HAL theses’ content is harvested by the portal, thus offering the texts international visibility.
mediHAL
Created and launched in 2010 by CCSD, in partnership with the Centre National pour la Numérisation de Sources Visuelles (CN2SV) and with the support of TGE Adonis (now Huma-Num), mediHAL is an open archive for depositing visual and audio data (fixed images, videos and audio), produced as part of scientific research.
Researchers from all disciplines can deposit their research data here. Visual, audio-visual and audio data filed directly in HAL is also visible in MediHAL
Each deposit has a unique identifier in the form of medihal-00000000 and a persistent url.
Accepted file formats
- image : jpg, jpeg, jpe, jps, png, gif, tif, tiff, ms3d, odg, otg, pct, svg
- video : avi, flv, mov, movie, mp4, mpe, mpeg, mpg, qt, rm, rmvb, rv, vob, wmv, m4a, m4v
- son : aac, ac3, aif, aifc, aiff, au, bwf, mp2, mp3, M4r, ogg, ogm, ra, ram, wma, wav
- carte : jpg, jpeg, jpe, jps, png, gif, tif, tiff, ms3d, odg, otg, pct, pdf, doc, docx, ppt, pptx, odc, ods, rtf, odf, odt, ott, svg