The CCSD publishes its 2020 activity report: let’s take this opportunity to take a look at the past year.
During 2020, the activity in HAL was intense: there were 167,000 new documents with files deposited in HAL! Before the summer, the finalization of the migration of the Prodinra and Irstea publications archives represented an important part of this, since more than 62,000 documents have been imported. The end of the year was marked by the implementation of the CNRS policy which asked researchers to link their annual activity report (CRAC) to the deposit of the full text: the campaign took place over a few weeks and the activity was very sustained, both in HAL and for the support and assistance service of the CCSD which was very busy during this period (support tickets, training).
2020 at the time of COVID
During this very special year, the CCSD set up direct access to publications related to the pandemic on the HAL homepage to support the effort to share the knowledge of researchers and their teams on COVID-19. 1,190 publications dealing with COVID were thus deposited in 2020, mostly articles (747) and a significant proportion of preprints (268) which is a testimony of the vitality of French research.
The pandemic has clearly had an impact on scientific meetings, as shown by the slowdown in activity on the Sciencesconf conference organisation platform: during the first lockdown in France, for example, 88 scientific events managed on the platform were scheduled to take place between 16 and 31 March, and 83 in April. They were cancelled or postponed.
The working organisation of the CCSD, like many other teams, experienced lockdown and telecommuting, but everything was done to guarantee the continuity of the services widely used by the scientific communities. The involvement of each of the members made it possible to stay on course and ensure the completion of ongoing projects and the implementation of new ones.
2020 an important milestone
2020 is a turning point for the CCSD as solid foundations have been laid to ensure its sustainable development. The Open Science Steering Committee has approved a new governance for the CCSD and a new funding model for HAL in order to take into account the diversity of its users’ needs and secure its development. The first meeting of the partners’ assembly will take place on July 1st: it will bring together representatives of the 132 institutions that have a HAL portal.
A lot of energy was mobilised during several months to give evolution opportunities for the CCSD platforms and these efforts were rewarded: the CCSD has indeed responded to three calls for projects, all of which have been successful:
- The National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) is financing a 24-month project to improve the interoperability of HAL with preprint review services. It is based on Episciences and on a partnership with Peer Community In (PCI).
- Episciences is a partner of the European OpenAIRE Nexus project, which aims to integrate a portfolio of services into the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) portal. The project will last 30 months and will enable the development of interfaces with other project stakeholders such as the OpenAIRE statistics system, OpenCitations, Scholexplorer and OpenAIRE PROVIDE. Episciences will also interconnect with Zenodo,
- Finally, the HALliance project is the winner of the call for expressions of interest of the PIA3 (ESR/EquipEx+) which aims to support equipment of national scope. HALiance will last 5 years and aims to overhaul HAL’s core services and align them with the recommendations and criteria of excellence defined in the context of national and international initiatives in favour of open science.
Activity report (in french)
We will celebrate the 20 years of HAL in 2021. It will be an opportunity to look at the young but already very rich past of the open archive of the French research and especially to prepare its future.