Centre national de la recherche scientifique

The CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique - National Centre for Scientific Research) is a signatory of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. As a result of the Berlin 3 meeting, it has committed itself to the creation of institutional repositories based on the pre-existing HAL platform, developed by the CNRS unit CCSD (Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe).

HAL (Hyper Articles Online) is a repository to deposit documents and automatically upload them in ArXiv if they belong to a scientific field in its coverage. The search engine facilitates subjectbrowsing or a conventional search. Extra services were also developed in response to the needs of researchers and labs (lists of publications, customized views, etc.). In July 2006, the Archives-Ouvertes network was created. Representatives of French research institutions and consortia are gathered in different instances, a strategic committee, an executive and a technical committee discussing the evolution of open archiving and HAL. Two CNRS units dedicated to the access to research output will be involved in the DRIVER-II project: CCSD (Centre pour la communication scientifique directe- Centre for direct scientific communication) and INIST (Institut de l’information scientifique et technique – Institute for Scientific and Technical Information) . They are both active participants in the various instances of the Archives-Ouvertes network. The CCSD was founded in 2000 by the CNRS in response to the needs of accessing to research results. Started as a mirror for ArXiv, the CCSD began to develop HAL. CCSD has extensive experience with OAI-compliant IR: harvesting; interface development; assessing and implementation of IR-software; standards for metadata schema; and Web services. It is involved in major standardization initiatives such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. INIST is a unit founded in 1988 by the CNRS to collect, index and disseminate the results of research in science, technology, health sciences, humanities and social sciences. INIST has been developing subject-oriented portals providing digital resources to differentiated research communities for several years. The experience it has built in the on-line provision of information has also been derived from INIST's implication in several projects of the 3rd ,4th, 5th and 6th EU Framework programs for research and technological development dedicated to digital information access.

Contact Persons:

• Daniel Charnay
• Anne-Marie Badolato