Stevan Harnad on HAL
Here are some of Stevan Harnad’s thoughts on HAL (November 29):
Apparently France — a country highly centralised since Napoleonic days, with its unique national research institutions, of which the CNRS is the biggest — is in a structural and functional position to do something, at a national level, at one stroke, that no other country is quite in the position to do. The idea is to create one national OA archive for all disciplines and all institutions and universities to deposit all their research into: HAL (Hyper Articles on Line). This unified national effort is meant to avoid the kinds of divisiveness that in the UK led to a self-archiving recommendation by a parliamentary committee, subsequently rejected by the government, subsequently taken up again by the 8 UK Research Councils (RCUK) and now opposed by the Royal Society (Britain’s academy of science). In France, there is now the hope that not only will the big national research institutes (CNRS, INSERM, INRA, INRIA) unite in this national enterprise, but so will the French Academy of Sciences, as well as all the French Universities. If it succeeds, it will be an enormous coup for France, and a terrific direction-setter for the rest of the world — though probably no country would be in a position to emulate it exactly, for lack of corresponding centralised national institutions….It will be interesting to see whether the centralisation proves to be an asset or liability. It is impossible to predict, because the case of France is so unique, but a UK study on central vs. institutional self-archiving came up with a different recommendation for the UK, suggesting that not only would distributed local institutional and university archives, plus harvesting (including central harvesting) be cheaper than a central archiving model in the era or OAI-interoperability, but, even more important, the local institutional incentives and culture are likely to be more conducive to archive-filling, because of shared interests and benefits between researchers and their institutions….But who knows? No one has a winning formula for reaching 100% OA as quickly and reliably as possible until a formula has been demonstrated to win. Perhaps France’s unique configuration makes a formula possible there that would not work elsewhere. Moreover, we live in a virtual world, and each institution’s and university’s sector of HAL could be customised and given the look of and put under the control of each local content-providing institution. The real question is whether France’s national OA mega-archive will be backed up with a self-archiving mandate, or it will rely only on volunteerism, for volunteerism has proved to be a poor deliverer of OA so far.
source: Stevan Harnad on HAL
