If you deposit your preprint in HAL for submission to one of the journals hosted by Episciences, you can now select the journal directly from the deposit form and HAL will do the rest.
This feature is only displayed at the end of the deposit form if the following two conditions are met: the selected document type is “Preprint/Prepublication” and a full-text file is deposited. Once online after the moderation step, HAL automatically notifies the relevant journal and the editorial board takes charge of the submitted manuscript.
The submission process via HAL is thus streamlined and transparent for researchers.
HALOWIN Project
This new feature is a result of the HALOWIN project, funded by the National Fund for Open Science (FNSO). It runs until the end of 2023 and it aims to improve interoperability between HAL and preprint review services. Specifically, it will develop a technical framework that enables the automated exchange of documents, metadata and notifications. The aim is not only to identify, but also to develop, deploy and test all the functionalities necessary to link HAL and Episciences on the one hand, and HAL and Peer Community In (PCI) on the other.
The project is part of the international initiative launched by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) to define open protocols and standards for linking peer-review services and open archives.
It is based on the implementation in HAL of the COAR Notify protocol, which uses established W3C standards, Linked Data Notifications and Activity Streams 2.0, to exchange standardised messages between a repository and a preprint review service. The exchange between HAL and Episciences thus represents an implementation use case of this protocol (see the poster presented at the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access last October). The protocol is implemented with the COAR Notify Manager developed by Cottage Labs for the CCSD and funded thanks to the FNSO ; the library is available for free as an open source software with a MIT License.
In addition to simplifying and streamlining processes for researchers, the project aims to promote the HAL interoperability layer to various international peer review services. The implementation of the COAR Notify protocol in HAL also paves the way for other types of exchange focusing on different objects, such as the link between publication and research data.