Make your work open access is the first thing to do to increase your visibility and your citation rate.

They are two ways to achieve this:

The first one is Green Open Access. You submit your paper to a paywalled journal, and...congratulations! it has been accepted with only some minors changes to make. Then, according to the French law, if your paper is a journal article on Sciences, Technical Sciences or Medicine, funded by more than 50% public funds, then you have the right to deposit a copy of it in an open access repository as soon as six months after the date of publication.

The second one is Gold Open Access. After acceptance, your paper will be published in an open access journal provided your lab or university pays some money to cover the cost of publication. This model has been perverted by a number of great publishers whose fees far exceed this cost. Such fees are usually called Article Processing Charges and maintain pressure on public research budgets. You must also be aware that the rise of open access publication allowed lots of crook publishers to seek money from research teams : under the promise that they will quickly publish your work, they will skip the peer-reviewing process or charge anybody of it, take your money and publish a paper that was not reviewed, at least according the standards of peer reviewing shared by the majority of the scientific community. These crook publishers are called "predatory open access publishers".

In order to load a copy of your work on HAL servers, you will have to create an account

Then, click on Deposit

You can load the PDF of the publication in the same time as its DOI.

A usefull feature of the last version of HAL allows the user to automatically extract the metadata associated to the DOI (when it has been indexed by Google Scholar) or the metadata embedded in the PDF itself so that you will not have to type them.

Once it is done, you will have to provide your affiliation (to a lab, a research team a university). This is may be the most tedious part of the process, but it is important for research institutions to follow the production of their research units and, besides, this metadata make your work more "findable" on the web.

These are some rules and principles you will have to observe when you deposit a paper in our repository:

Our repository is not a bibliographic database. Although a lot of people do it by ignorance of their own interest or lack of concern for public interest, it is useless to save the references of your paper without giving access to the PDF.

Google Scholar pagerank minimize pages that contain only metadata and do not provide any link to the full text. HAL can make your work visible on search engines provided you add the PDF to your references.

Most of the time, you cannot deposit the publisher version of the paper without violating copyright provisions. You have to deposit your peer-reviewed manuscript instead (what we call a post-print). Publishers policies on Open Access are updated on the SherpaRomeo website.

It is not immediate, some librarians work everyday on HAL to filter deposited papers and check that they fulfill legal requirements (publisher policy or French law). They will either accept your deposit or ask for more information.

Once admitted, your paper will appear online and be archived for decades