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Comment by guerby | Hacker News Reader

In France we have HAL:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Articles_en_Ligne

"Hyper Articles en Ligne, generally shortened to HAL, is an open archive where authors can deposit scholarly documents from all academic fields."

I work at a university and I know library people and management check carefully that every paper we produce is deposited in HAL.

Also:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_articles_en_ligne

"Depuis le 25 septembre 2018, les dépôts de logiciels sur HAL sont connectés à Software Heritage"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Heritage

For recruiting some french institutions like CNRS will only consider papers deposited in HAL when doing the evaluation.

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In Norway any publication needs to be deposited to the national archive by law. That includes scientific journals and in theory even small publications distributed in a private setting if it's a big enough group of people (I'm not sure of the details). Not sure how it works for scientific work published in foreign publications, but I assume it's sent to the national archive as routine.

However, most of the archive is not publicly accessible due to copyright, privacy etc. You can request access to specific content both as a private person and as a researcher.

In the US, I believe the Library of Congress fills a similar role.

IIRC, some years back I read that the Library even had a full archive of all of Twitter, up to that date at least.

They changed their policy back in 2017:

However, almost 12 years of tweets is still very cool. A LOT of startups probably had quite a bit of material in those early days of social media.

But today, the institution announced it will no longer archive every one of our status updates, opinion threads, and "big if true"s. As of Jan. 1, the library will only acquire tweets "on a very selective basis."

The library says it began archiving tweets "for the same reason it collects other materials — to acquire and preserve a record of knowledge and creativity for Congress and the American people." The archive stretches back to Twitter's beginning, in 2006.

The institution says it will continue to preserve its collection of tweets from the platform's first 12 years, but indicates that it has yet to figure out exactly how to make the archive public.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/26/573609499...

what a waste of disk space :)

the US for medical/biology papers "The National Center for Biotechnology Information" NCBI. They store papers/ abstracts in a service called pubmed,

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

It works pretty well. Papers are submitted. The get a unique id. Some are stored and accessible. (Some US funding sources require public accessible papers.).

NCBI has a ton of information. Its a pretty awesome resource. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

They even index the paper submitted with a controlled vocabulary of terms (within a month or two) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/

Nearly all federally-funded (and unclassified) research needs to be publicly accessible, as per a 2013 policy memo.

Yes, and of course we have arXiv and friends, and sci-hub, and researchers' and institutions' own pages.

But all this misses the point a little -- it is not just the articles that should be preserved, but the journal itself, as a collection of articles with metadata (including the fact that it was collected in the journal), records of editorial boards, editorial articles, etc.

A similar service, arXiv[0], is used in other fields as well. In fact, the parent study that we're discussing was itself found on arXiv.

However, arXiv is (or aims to be) a supra-national organization. Do you think it is preferable to have an international standard repository for this knowledge like arXiv, a network of federated, national systems such as HAL, or both?

ArXiv has historically sometimes found itself hard-up for funding, so I think that a valid argument could be made for both approaches.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/

FYI, arxiv is for the pre-prints, i.e. the papers as they are before peer review and publication in a proper journal. IEEE and friends hold the copyright to the articles after that, and generally do _not_ want you to publish "their" version.

Which is strange, as you paid them to publish your article, that was likely paid for by state funding -- aka tax money. Ah, the academic racket is so beautiful.

HAL proposes to authors automatic transfer to a few open archives:

"Transfert automatique des documents vers une archive ouverte internationale telle qu'ArXiv ou Pubmed Central "

In Latin America, the SciELO network has been very successful at providing shared, low-cost, stable infrastructure for digital journal hosting using state funding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciELO

One major issue with HAL is that they accepted (under political/hierarchical pressure) to host only references without the actual paper PDF. So now its archive is filled with bibliographic references without any article archived paper.

It’s totally counter to its original purpose, and was implemented for researchers to be able to fulfill the internal CNRS mandate to list their paper on HAL without needing to actually host the paper there.

In the UK we have to deposit with the institution you were working/studying at. It's a bit annoying as there's no central place to deposit.

You can use Zenodo (hosted at CERN with some EU funding). https://zenodo.org/

Do you do bulk archival on your own will, i.e. without the authors having to ask and provide files?

For instance, there are about 140k works under a Creative Commons license (mostly free ones, some unfree) from French authors, most of which aren't preserved on any open archive. https://www.lens.org/lens/search/scholar/list?p=0&n=10&s=ref...

> For recruiting some french institutions like CNRS will only consider papers deposited in HAL when doing the evaluation.

While I like HAL in general as a consumer, that policy is terrible if true for people like me who started their academic career abroad. One more reason not to go back, I guess.

I would be very surprised if there wasn't some exception for papers published abroad. Otherwise they would be potentially ignoring a lot of information about candidates.

You can add all articles afterwards (even though it can be tedious).

There is actually a tool that is supported by HAL that makes it easier to quickly add all your publications by just giving your name: https://dissem.in/

For instance, it automatically fills in all the metadata for your publications.

I'm astonished there's not an equivalent for this literally everywhere. Even if some articles seem not terribly important at the moment, as progress marches on many could become relevant again and losing access to those is simply inexcusable.

There (mostly) is.

Work funded by the NIH needs to end up in PubMed Central within a year of publication. The NSF and DoE have similar policies. Unclassified DoD-funded work also needs to end up in the Defense Technical Information Center. All of this flows from a 2013 memo by John Holdren/OST entitled "Increasing Access to Results of Federally Funded Science", and, as far as I know, it hasn't been overturned. While this doesn't formally cover everything, it comes pretty close and many journals now handle this automatically.

The memo is here: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/02/22/increas...

Canada has a similar policy for Tri-Council funded research (here: http://www.science.gc.ca/eic/site/063.nsf/eng/h_F6765465.htm...) but does not require specific repositories.

It would be even better if the papers that are referenced were also archived in the same store... not for republication, which I guess could have copyright issues, but for the sake of preserving the prior art that may be necessary to understand context and the specific advances described in a paper

Actually, although it is mainly directed to French researchers, nothing prevents researchers not based in France to deposit their papers there.

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