More on HAL
Since September, five major French research organizations –CNRS, Inserm, Inria, Inra, and the CPU– have been working together on a single, national OA repository called HAL (Hyper Article on Line). Here’s a recent (though undated) interview with Laurent Romary, Director of Scientific Communication at CNRS, on where HAL stands. (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.) Excerpt:
[HAL] is due to the convergence of three major movements. The first is the concept of direct scientific communications, initiated by the physics community and incarnated by the American Arxiv archive system. Second is the “open access” movement encouraging direct access to scientific publications, embodied by the Berlin declaration signed jointly by fifty major universities and European research organizations. Third, those organizations and universities need a reliable, detailed panorama of scientific publications, essential for their scientific policy and for evaluation purposes. The convergence of these three movements led to the decision to create a single archive for the entire French scientific community offering powerful, practical tools and services for research scientists and guaranteeing long-term preservation of documents. An agreement will be signed to formalize this collaboration between the various organizations. This single archive will significantly improve the visibility, dissemination, and the international impact of French scientific research, as data will be indexed by major search engines such as Google. Furthermore, the chosen platform – HAL (Hyper Articles on Line) – communicates with other major international archives such as Arxiv and (shortly) Pubmed Central….This tool, developed by the CCSD and inspired by the American Arxiv system, offers research scientists a range of extremely useful services that make it a truly interactive solution (see the sidebar). HAL will soon be coupled with Term-Sciences, a multilingual terminology portal developed by Inist. This tool will enable users to search for and view international scientific terms in several languages….Finally, networks will be set up of “referring” documentalists trained by Inist. Serving the entire scientific community and working closely with research scientists, the documentalists will be notified automatically whenever a document is submitted. They will be responsible for verifying and correcting the quality of the metadata provided with the documents, which is vital for proper document indexing and dissemination. I should add that HAL will also enable research organizations to set up watchdog systems to identify emerging trends in research.
Here’s a brief “sidebar” on HAL by Bruno de la Perrière, from the same page as the interview:
“Today HAL is technically far superior to Arxiv”, proudly explains Franck Laloë, CCSD Director and creator of HAL. HAL provides an extensive set of tools and services that are extremely beneficial to research scientists: [1] automatic document submission (for both publications or pre-prints) with a link to an international open archive that increases visibility and impact, [2] simplified submission process for research scientists: a single submission can cover all the researcher’s work, evaluation procedures, activity reports, and replies to requests for quotations. The system provides tools for selecting and exporting publication lists, [3] advanced search engine, classification and searches using multiple criteria (publication date, scientific field, collection, organization, or laboratory), [4] automatic online extraction of all works by author, laboratory, or organization, with possible links to the organization’s local Web site (by including HAL in a given metadata structure, it is possible to specify the author/laboratory/organization affiliation), [4] creation of “collections” via buffers for authentication of a laboratory’s publications, the articles in a journal, etc. [5] alert and watchdog system that can be customized with user-defined profiles, [6] finally, HAL is designed to facilitate the creation of configurable interfaces for organizations to create their own environments.
source: More on HAL
