HAL is the French national open archive managed by the Centre for Direct Scientific Communication at CNRS, providing researchers and institutions with tools for submitting, discovering, and sharing academic publications across disciplines and languages. On April 10, 2025, HAL was featured in the AfricArXiv Open Science Webinar series, hosted by UbuntuNet Alliance and Access2perspectives with support from the Africa Open Science Platform. This session offered a bridge between European and African scholarly communities and highlighted the power of open access to unite researchers across borders.
Our guide through HAL was Bénédicte Kuntziger of the Center for Direct Scientific Communication at CNRS. With over three decades of experience as a documentation engineer and a passion for open science she has shaped HAL’s evolution since 2013. In her role leading support training and community engagement she ensures that researchers can tap into HAL’s rich repository of publications and help expand its reach.
Bénédicte began by mapping HAL’s core services including streamlined submission workflows robust metadata management and intuitive discovery tools. She explained how institutions and individual scholars can deposit articles monographs and conference proceedings and then navigate the archive with advanced search filters. Emphasis was placed on HAL’s commitment to inclusivity through bilingual and multilingual support allowing submissions in French English and other languages.
The conversation then turned to technical interoperability and content curation. Bénédicte shared examples of how HAL connects with institutional repositories elsewhere enabling seamless data exchange. She highlighted collections tailored to African research themes such as regional history agriculture and social sciences and invited participants to propose new subject collections. Questions from attendees delved into best practices for metadata standards strategies for enhancing visibility and ways to cultivate community contributions from underrepresented regions.
The session was eye opening to all participants and is available on the official AfricArXiv YouTube channel where you are invited to watch it, like and subscribe here. To explore more sessions in this series and receive updates on upcoming webinars please register
here.