HAL (Hyper Articles en Ligne) is the French national open archive - a free, multidisciplinary repository where researchers share published and unpublished work. It was created in 2001 by CNRS physicist Franck Laloë and is run by the CCSD (Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), a service unit supported by CNRS, Inria, and INRAE from Villeurbanne, near Lyon. As of August 2026, HAL holds more than 4.6 million records, of which roughly 1.8 million include a full-text file, and it underpins 150+ institutional portals for French universities and research organizations.

HAL is not a publisher in the conventional sense: it charges nothing, performs no peer review, and assigns no acceptance decision. Instead, it is the backbone of green open access in France - the place where preprints, accepted manuscripts (postprints), theses, conference papers, book chapters, and reports become permanently and freely available. France's national open science plans name HAL as the national open archive, and several French institutions - including CNRS - direct their researchers to deposit the full text of their publications in HAL.

1. Create an account on hal.science (or your institution's HAL portal - deposits propagate to the central archive either way).
2. Choose the document type - preprint, journal article, conference paper, thesis, book chapter, report, dataset link, or other research output.
3. Upload the file and enter metadata - title, authors and affiliations, discipline, abstract, and (for published work) the journal reference and DOI. Check your right to deposit the version you are uploading; for published articles, the accepted manuscript is usually the safe version under French law and most journal policies.
4. Pass moderation - CCSD moderators check every deposit that includes a file (see below). Deposits are usually online within a week.
5. Get your hal-XXXXXXX identifier - a stable, citable identifier. New versions can be added later; each version is preserved.

HAL moderation is a scope-and-format check, not peer review. Moderators verify that the document is a genuine research output with usable metadata. Documents outside scope are refused - for example course syllabi, tables of contents alone, bare bibliographies, or CVs. Nothing about the scientific validity of the work is assessed, so a HAL deposit is not a mark of peer-reviewed quality.

One rule surprises many first-time depositors: deposits with full text cannot be deleted. HAL is a permanent archive, so once a file is online it stays online. You can upload a corrected new version, or apply an embargo to an unpublished file, but you cannot withdraw it - so check the file and your co-authors' agreement before you deposit.

Cite a HAL document like any preprint or report, in the citation style of the venue you are writing for, and include the HAL identifier and URL. A typical reference looks like:

Author, A. (2026). Title of the paper. HAL. hal-04123456. https://hal.science/hal-04123456

If the paper has since been published in a journal, cite the published version of record instead, and use the HAL copy as your free-access link. SciSpace templates keep the original journal's citation style, so no HAL-specific formatting is needed beyond the identifier.

The standard workflow for a France-affiliated researcher: deposit the preprint in HAL (establishing priority and a citable hal- identifier), submit to a journal as usual, then update the HAL record with the accepted manuscript once the paper is accepted. French law (Loi pour une République numérique, 2016) gives authors of publicly funded research the right to self-archive the accepted manuscript after at most 6 months (STM) or 12 months (humanities and social sciences), regardless of the publisher's contract.

HAL is entirely free: no deposit fees, no reading fees, no APCs. It is publicly funded through CNRS, Inria, INRAE, and partner institutions as national research infrastructure. If a website ever asks you to pay to deposit in or access HAL, it is not HAL.

• hal.science - the central multidisciplinary archive.
• HAL-SHS - the humanities and social sciences portal.
• TEL - the theses and dissertations portal.
• MédiHAL - images, video, and audio research outputs.
• Institutional portals - 150+ university and lab portals (e.g., HAL-Inria, HAL-CNRS) that feed the central archive.
• arXiv transfer - qualifying deposits (right discipline, English abstract, LaTeX sources) can be forwarded to arXiv from HAL.

Use HAL when you want free, permanent, government-backed open access to your work - especially if you are affiliated with a French institution or funded by the ANR or other French agencies that expect HAL deposit. Use it alongside, not instead of, journal submission: HAL gives your work visibility and a stable identifier, while the journal provides peer review and the version of record.