OA Progress in France

Here are actual and projected growth rate statistics for France's national OA Repository, HAL, kindly supplied by HAL's architect and helmsman, Franck Laloe. France's annual research output is about 12,000 articles per month, so HAL's present spontaneous deposit rate of 1600 articles per month is about the same as the baseline of 15% for spontaneous (unmandated) self-archiving worldwide today.
Monthly Deposits in HAL: Two Extrapolations
[Linearlog/log fit and projections done via Origin]
Spontaneous self-archiving in HAL seems to have begun in about 2002, so it is not clear whether the monthly deposit rate will continue to accelerate or was simply catching up with the baseline at which all other unmandated self-archiving rates have been idling for years now. If HAL's monthly deposit growth rate is indeed exponential, then HAL will reach 100% self-archiving in 5 years without a mandate; if it is a power curve ("puissance") it will take 15 years; if (like Arxiv) it is linear, it will take even longer. (Arxiv's power exponent has been unchangingly quadratic for 15 years, HAL's so far seems ternary)

Franck Laloe: [translated from French] "There are also some small research institutes in France which are already self-archiving 100% of their research output, for example IN2P3, a component (high-energy physics) of CNRS. A team of 3 documentalists deposits 100% of IN2P3 article output in Hal-IN2P3, because on a small scale this is possible. Another example is IFREMER, a small institute for research on seas and oceans. They have a small, well-done archive containing 100% of their output. As to my own field of research, it has been self-archiving at 99% in ArXiv for a long time…"

There seem to be two morals to this story: (1) Even a centralised national archiving system in a centralised country like France, cannot succeed without a national deposit mandate; (2) until France adopts a national deposit mandate, it too, like all other countries, will have to rely on individual institutional (and research-funder) mandates.

Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads:

Are things otherwise in France? (began May, 1999)
INIST/CNRS : nouveautés du site Libre Accès (Dec 2004)
France's INRIA Registers Commitment to Implement Berlin Declaration Self-Archiving Policy Recommendation (Mar 2005)
France's CNRS Registers Commitment to Implement Berlin Declaration Self-Archiving Policy Recommendation (May 2005)
Hélène Bosc et le progrès en accès libre en france (Mar 2006)
Guide juridique CNRS (Nov 2005)
CNRS position on OA : new details (Jun 2006)
Forthcoming OA Developments in France (Jun 2006)
France's HAL, OAI interoperability, and Central vs Institutional Repositories (Oct 2006)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum