As described in the roadmap for research infrastructure of the French ministry for research and the national plan for open science, HAL is a multidisciplinary archive used by the French scientific community to disseminate scientific results. It is on the one hand side a unique repository and archive for the French research institutes and on the other hand a powerful search engine for scientific publications and theses across all disciplines.

Submitting articles to HAL

• increases the visibility of scientific results

• increases the impact of scientific works:

Indeed, scientific studies have found a correlation between how many times an article is cited by other scientific works and its submission to an open repository. For example, a study of the University of Liège has studied how often scientific articles have been referenced on Web of Science and Scopus that were available on the open repository Orbi, compared to those which were not. The study found that the number of citations for articles which are openly available is twice as high as for those which are not. Other studies that have established similar correlations are

• Article JMLA (2020) : "Conclusion: Based on the available literature, institutional repositories appear to have a positive impact on citation count, exposure or presence, and administrative burden."Demetres, Michelle R., Diana Delgado, and Drew N. Wright. "The impact of institutional repositories: a systematic review." Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA 108.2 (2020): 177. https://dx.doi.org/10.5195%2Fjmla.2020.856
• Article JAL (2020) : "The evidence here suggests that green OA, despite delays in access, enjoys a significant advantage in citation rates over gold OA, possibly due to enhanced discoverability." Young, Jonathan S., and Patricia M. Brandes. "Green and gold open access citation and interdisciplinary advantage: A bibliometric study of two science journals." The Journal of Academic Librarianship 46.2 (2020): 102105. https://doi-org.passerelle.univ-rennes1.fr/10.1016/j.acalib.2019.102105
• Article Scientometrics (2010). Etude comparative de 4 839 articles publiés dans 5 revues de référence en physique. Au moment de la publication des articles en revue, les articles déposés dans une archive ouverte (ArXiv) récoltent 20 % du total cumulé de citations sur 3 ans (période allant de 1 an avant publication, et 2 ans après publication). L'écart se creuse après publication : au bout de 2 ans, on comptabilise en moyenne 14 citations pour les articles déposés dans ArXiv, contre moins de 4 pour les articles non déposés dans l'archive ouverte.
• Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics. How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories - Gentil-Beccot, Anne et al. Scientometrics 84 (2010) 345. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0111-1

• allows for a better assessment of the scientific production of researchers or institutes, which is relevant for evaluations and grant applications
• grants additional services:

HAL offers many useful, personalised features to treat your publications

• export of full publication lists.
• usage statistics and visualisations with VizuHAL.
• a dynamical link to all your publications that can be easily integrated in homepages or grant applications
• alerts about new publications
• personalised web page allowing you to configure your CV, personal publications and further personal data

• provides legal protection for your work

• guarantees accessibility of your files and articles in perpetuity

• grants open and free access to state of the art research