Open Access in France

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Open Access Repositories

The DRIVER Inventory Study found that there are approximately 40 OAI repositories in France. However, not all of them are institutional repositories with full text, in some cases they contain metadata only or raw data. Thus, it is estimated that more than 30 universities have a OAI repository.

The HAL archive is a national aggregator which offers a common platform to multiple archives, whether institutional (HAL-INSERM) or topic-related (HAL-SHS for humanities and social sciences) or format-related (TEL for PHD thesis). HAL gathers material from any French (and other) research institution. All French Universities, major higher education schools (conference des grandes écoles) and major research institutes have signed a common protocol to make HAL their common platform to host nationally the French research available in open access.

In other words, this national agreement means that all research institutions have agreed to either deposited in HAL or to develop their own repository and deposit the content of that repository in HAL.

The report goes on to state that in France, institutional, national and disciplinary archives co-exist. A general policy has been widely accepted to coordinate such archives at the national level through a common platform. However, if the national scale has the potential to provide efficient advisory services, metadata creation and enhancement support etc, it would be important to relay this effort at European and/or international level, notably through facilitating the creation of disciplinary archives.

Open Access Organisations/Groups

In France there is the Couperin Consortium. This is the only French academic libraries consortium. Its web address is http://www.couperin.org

Open Access Projects/Initiatives

In December 2006, the Couperin consortium - the sole French academic libraries consortium - set up a working group on open archives (GTAO) in which the French universities and "Grandes Ecoles" are represented. The goals of the group are on the one hand to help institutions build institutional repositories by way of advice and guidance on technical concerns, communication toward the research community, legal issues etc., and on the other hand to draw up an inventory of existing open archives and current projects in French universities.

This investigation is currently taking place and final results will be available towards June 2007. It should help in describing more precisely the French OA scene.

Open Access Journals

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Copyright

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Funding Policies

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Publishers and Open Access

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Current Local News & Events

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