HAL is the French national open repository for scholarly publications, open to researchers from all disciplines and countries. It hosts over 1.5 million full-text documents, 70% of which are in English, and supports more than 150 institutional portals from French universities and other research organisations. It is a general-purpose repository and can also provide deposit and specific services for software thanks to a collaboration with Software Heritage.
All submissions undergo a verification process prior to publication, and metadata are curated and aligned with international standards. In addition to bibliographic data, HAL provides rich contextual metadata—such as affiliations, funding, and project information—and supports links to related outputs like datasets and software. HAL is CoreTrustSeal certified and acknowledged by the European Research Council as a trusted repository.
All data and metadata are fully open to both researchers and citizens through web interfaces and APIs. From hal.science, users can search, view, and download publications, while the open API ensures programmatic access to HAL’s content.
HAL
Use Case Status Before Joining EOSC Data Commons
HAL is designed to disseminate and preserve scholarly publications and to connect them with related research outputs. Through dedicated services, HAL enables explicit links between publications and datasets hosted in external repositories, as well as with software archived in Software Heritage. To ensure interoperability, HAL implements the COAR Notify protocol, supporting standardised data exchange with other repositories, and relies on DataCite to describe and qualify the relationships between publications and datasets. However, merely exposing these relationships is not sufficient for them to be harvested by the EOSC Matchmaker. This limits the visibility of links between research objects, making it harder to discover related resources, constraining the analysis of scientific impact, and hindering the integrated reuse of data, publications, and software.
Objectives in the Project
- Enhance the discoverability of HAL metadata and its richness;
- Improve the FAIRness of HAL metadata;
- Ensure the pairing of publications in HAL with datasets;
- Make HAL accessible via the EOSC Matchmaker API
Integration with EOSC Data Commons Services and Components
EOSC Matchmaker
HAL exposes its metadata through an OAI-PMH server and an RDF triplestore for harvesting. The expected outcome is that HAL metadata will be fully discoverable and accessible via the AI-powered search engine and metadata warehouse.
FAIR Assessment Toolkit
To assess and enhance the FAIRness of HAL metadata, we plan to use the FAIR Assessment Toolkit to evaluate existing records and guide improvements.
The expected results of the project include enhanced discoverability of HAL metadata, along with the development of a knowledge graph linking publications to related datasets, facilitating more integrated access to research outputs and promoting greater transparency and reproducibility in science.
Technical Integration Plan
HAL is actively participating in the Proof of Concept release with the harvesting of metadata via the OAI-PMH interface.
The integration with the EOSC Matchmaker is completed in the fi rst release. The FAIR Assessment Toolkit is applied to a selected group of datasets.
The integration of HAL with the EOSC Matchmaker is completed. The FAIR Assessment Toolkit has been extensively used across the datasets of the repository.