The National Network of Technical Validators brings together the professionals who check deposits with file(s) before they go online in HAL. Run by the CCSD, which has operated HAL since 2001, it aims to structure this community, pool its practices and equip it, in the service of the quality and consistency of the national open archive.
The network brings together more than 250 active validators, spread across more than 50 organizations throughout the country, in mainland France and overseas. Many of them are library, documentation or research-support staff, for whom validation is most often part of a broader set of duties.
What is a validating institution? It is an institution (university, research organization, specialized higher education institution, etc.) with a HAL portal, whose staff have received a delegation from the CCSD to validate the deposits within their scope. This delegation is granted to trained staff and remains revocable. The institution thus organizes the collection, promotion and validation of the deposits of its scientific community.
It is this articulation between national steering, the guarantor of the consistency and legitimacy of the system, and the local roots of the institutions, closest to the depositors, that the network aims to keep alive and to strengthen.
What is technical validation?
Every document deposited in HAL goes through technical validation before being published. This is a compliance check, not a scientific evaluation: validation judges neither the quality nor the content of a work; it verifies that it can be distributed under proper conditions.
In practice, the person validating checks in particular:
- that the file is readable and complete;
- that the declared document type matches what has been deposited;
- that distribution rights are respected (licenses, authorized version, publisher policy);
- that the essential metadata are consistent (title, authors, affiliations, references).
At the end of this check, the deposit may be accepted, returned to the depositor for correction, or refused when it falls outside the scope of the archive. Technical validation is thus distinct from metadata curation, which consists in enriching and standardizing a record, takes place after publication and is not blocking.
Depending on the case, validation is carried out either directly by the CCSD or by the validating institutions.
A network to structure a community
Around validation, there already exists a community of professionals who do this work day to day and exchange, to varying degrees, about their practices. The network was born of the desire to give a framework to this community of practice: not to impose an organization from above, but to build on what already exists in order to consolidate and share it.
Its action is organized around three objectives:
- Provide structure and tools: offer shared reference points, practical guides, decision trees and a library of real cases to draw on when facing a tricky situation;
- Harmonize practices: reduce differences in interpretation from one institution to another, to offer depositors a consistent service across the whole country;
- Keep peer-to-peer exchange alive: thematic webinars, participatory workshops, a national mailing list and mentoring, in a logic of shared governance between the CCSD and the institutions.
The stakes are twofold: to give validators confidence in their decisions, and to ensure that a problem already solved somewhere no longer has to be reinvented elsewhere.
A bottom-up approach
The network was built from a national survey conducted in late 2025 among HAL technical validators: 108 responses to a questionnaire and around ten in-depth interviews. This participatory approach made it possible to paint a portrait of a community that is recent, diverse and already partly structured, and to gather its concrete needs.
The network was officially launched at a webinar on 16 June 2026, which set out its framework, presented the survey results and opened the first projects, starting with a working group dedicated to producing decision-support tools.