50th Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate Worldwide: France's ANR/SHS

The Humanities and Social Sciences branch of France's Agence Nationale de la recherche has just announced its Green OA self-archiving mandate -- France's first funder mandate (France' second mandate overall, and the world's 50th). See ROARMAP

Note that the situation in France with central repositories is very different from the case of NIH's PMC repository: France's HAL is a national central repository where (in principle) (1) all French research output --from every field, and every institution-- can be deposited and (again, in principle) (2) every French institution (or department or funder) can have its own interface and "look" in HAL, a "virtual" Institutional Repository (IR), saving it the necessity of creating an IR of its own if it does not feel it needs to.

The crucial underlying question -- and several OA advocates in France are raising the question, notably, Hélène Bosc, in a forthcoming article (meanwhile, see this) -- is whether the probability of adopting institutional OA mandates in France is increased or decreased by the HAL option: Are universities more inclined to adopt a window on HAL, and to mandate central deposit of all their institutional research output, or would they be more inclined to mandate deposit in their own autonomous university IRs, which they manage and control?

Again, the SWORD protocol for automatic import and export between IRs and CRs is pertinent, because then it doesn't matter which way institutions prefer to do it.

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Agence Nationale de la recherche (ANR) (Humanities and Social Sciences Branch) (FRANCE*
funder-mandate)

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives

Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy

[Paraphrase by T. Chanier]

"The Humanities and Social Sciences branch of the French National Research Agency (ANR) mandates [requires] researchers involved in projects that it funds to deposit their scienfically validated (refereed postprint) publications in the HAL-SHS open archive, without any delay.

"HAL is a nation-wide open archive supported by all public French Research Insitutions. Hal-SHS is a sub-part dedicated to Humanities and Social Sciences

"In November 2007, the general ANR agency had merely invited its researchers to deposit in HAL

"This time (July 2008), the ANR's SHS branch mandates that its researchers deposit (and requests project leaders to confirm that the deposit is done by everyone)."

** text extracted (July 2008) from the ANR SHS text **

"Par un communiqué :en date du 14 novembre 2007, l’ANR incite les chercheurs, porteurs ou partenaires de projets financés par elle, à intégrer leurs publications dans le système d’archives ouvertes HAL avec lequel elle collabore.

"Le Département SHS de l’ANR et la cellule-support de l’ENS LSH souhaitent donner un écho particulier à cette directive qu’ils jugent essentielle pour une visibilité accrue de la recherche française en SHS.

"La communauté des porteurs et partenaires de projets ANR en SHS doit ainsi se mobiliser autour d’un objectif commun qui est celui d’un dépôt systématique de leurs productions scientifiques dans HAL- SHS, interface SHS de l’archive HAL.

"Il est demandé aux porteurs et responsables de projets ANR de s’assurer, au sein de leurs équipes (chercheurs, universitaires, post-doc, doctorants, qu’ils soient français et étrangers), de l’intégration dans HAL de l’ensemble des publications (articles, communications, contributions à ouvrages collectifs, ou autres productions éligibles) réalisées dans le cadre du projet, et ce, au fur et à mesure de leur élaboration (par exemple dès la soumission à une revue puis à nouveau au moment de la publication effective)."

Registered by: Thierry Chanier (Professor, leader of ANR SHS-funded project) on 29 Jul 2008