France has a nationwide archive, now needs a policy to fill it

Stevan Harnad, Access Archiving in France, Open Access Archivangelism, November 25, 2006.  Excerpt:

Franck Laloë (2006) Les archives ouvertes (AO) et la communication scientifique directe (CSD). Une présentation à la réunion du CNRS sur les archives ouvertes (Paris, 16 novembre 2006). (blog Libre Accès INIST)

Bravo to France and to Franck Laloë for the progress of the French national repository, HAL! As noted before in the AmSci Forum, it just might be that France -- an exception among western nations in this regard -- is a sufficiently centralised country to be able to manage 100% self-archiving of its research output of 120,000 articles per year in a centralised national archive (HAL) instead of a distributed network of Institutional Repositories (IRs).

But what is unlikely is that France is so much of an exception that it will be able to do this without a national self-archiving mandate. (See the graphs of HAL's current and projected growth rate in Franck's presentation and draw your own conclusion about whether and when 100% OA is likely to be reached in France without a mandate. Its present deposit rate seems to be about 12% of French output, which is about the international average for spontaneous [unmandated] self-archiving.)

The advantage of such centralisation, however, is that one national mandate will be enough....