Hyper Articles en Ligne, generally shortened to HAL, is an open archive where authors can deposit scholarly documents from all academic fields. It has a good position in the international web repository ranking. HAL is run by the Centre pour la communication scientifique directe, a French computing centre, which is part of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, CNRS. Other French institutions, such as INRIA, have joined the system. While it is primarily directed towards French academics, participation is not restricted to them. Documents in HAL are uploaded either by one of the authors with the consent of the others or by an authorized person on their behalf. Since 2017 it's also possible to use Dissem.in, a tool for easy and semi-automated deposit. HAL is a tool for direct scientific communication between academics. A text posted to HAL is normally comparable to that of a paper that an investigator might submit for publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal or conference proceedings. A document deposited in HAL will not be subjected to any detailed scientific evaluation, but simply a rapid overview, to ensure that it falls within the category defined above. An uploaded document does not need to have been published or even to be intended for publication: It may be posted to HAL as long as its scientific content justifies it. But should the article be published, contributors are invited to indicate the relevant bibliographic information and the digital object identifier. HAL aims to ensure the long term preservation of the deposited documents that are stored there permanently and will receive a stable web address. Thus, like any publication in a traditional scientific journal, it can be cited in other work. The free online access to these documents provided by HAL is intended to promote the best possible dissemination of research work; the intellectual property remains that of the authors. For physics, mathematics and other natural science topics, HAL has an automated depositing agreement with arXiv. A similar agreement exists with PubMed Central for biomedical topics. Over 120 institutions have their own entrance to HAL, called portals. HAL hosts institutional repositories as well as subject repositories ; one example is the Arts and Humanities eprint repository, hprints. As an open access repository, HAL complies with the Open Archives Initiative as well as with the European OpenAIRE project.
