Legal aspects

There are a number of legal provisions governing the open access dissemination of a scientific publication in an open archive such as HAL or Arxiv.

The guide ‘Je publie, quels sont mes droits ? (in french)’ lists the questions authors should ask themselves when they decide to publish their work. It gives advice and possible options to apply throughout the writing and publication process.

Loi pour une République Numérique (French Law for a Digital Republic)

Article 30 of  ‘Loi pour une République Numérique’ (French Law for a Digital Republic), passed on 7 October 2016, allows scientists whose research has been at least half-funded by public funds to publish their articles in open access on an open archive platform (such as HAL, ArXiv, etc.) in the form of the final version accepted for publication (post-print, VoR, post-publication, final draft, etc.), regardless of the contract signed with the publisher (including exclusive transfers of rights).

The maximum period before submission is 6 months for science and technology disciplines and 12 months for humanities and social sciences disciplines.

Please note:

• at least half of the research must be publicly funded: this includes the remuneration of researchers
• any co-authors must agree
• the publication must appear at least once a year
• some publishers or journals allow immediate distribution of post-prints or even the published version. To check this, visit the open policy finder website, which gives precise details of publishers’ open access policies

Several resources explain the application of this law:

• The FAQ (in french) produced by the Couperin open science working group on the application of  ‘Loi pour une République Numérique’ (French Law for a Digital Republic) provides information on what, how, when and where to submit your publication.
• The Application Guide (in french) to ‘Loi pour une République Numérique’ (French Law for a Digital Republic), written by researchers, legal experts and scientific and technical information professionals, provides researchers with simple information on the rights that the Law for a Digital Republic of October 2016 has opened up to them for the dissemination of their writings published in scientific journals
• All the legal aspects related to the deposit in HAL and to the use of HAL’s data are covered in HAL’s documentation

Rights retention strategy

The rights retention strategy, is a mechanism implemented by the S coalition. The aim is to enable authors to retain sufficient rights to be able to disseminate their articles in open access immediately, in accordance with the principles promoted by the Coalition and in line with the requirements of funders, regardless of how the journal is disseminated. Authors can thus retain control over the dissemination of their work, before, during and after the peer review process.

To this end, authors submitting an article are advised to affix a CC-BY licence to the various versions of their manuscript as soon as it is submitted to the journal. Authors inform their publishers that, for the purposes of open access dissemination, a CC-BY licence has been applied to the document and will be applied to any subsequent version.

Researchers can deposit their validated version for publication or post-print in an open archive such as HAL.

Practical guides explain to authors how to apply the rights retention strategy :

• The French Committee for Open Science guide, Implementing the strategy of non-assignment of rights to scientific publications, is very practical and includes a chart and FAQ, explaining the procedure to follow and possible remedies
• The Coalition S website also features a guide, a chart and a comprehensive FAQ

Article Processing Charges

If an article has been made available via open access after the payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) or publication fees (by one of the authors, a laboratory, etc.), the authors can immediately deposit the published version in an open archive.

Please note: in line with the National Open Science Plan, the UGA, a signatory of the Appel de Jussieu, recommends, in its charter and master plan, that authors give priority to journals that charge no fees to authors (no APC) and no fees to readers (subscription), according to the diamond model.

Licenses

To make it easier to consult the content deposited in an open archive, it is important that the authors assign them a user license that specifies the conditions for re-using the works.

Creative Commons licenses offer an easy way to define these conditions. They are recognised under French law. There are four licences:

• BY- attribution: This license allows any use of the work (sharing, adaptation, etc.) on any medium or in any format. The author must be cited. This CC-by license is recommended by many open archive platforms and by funding bodies.
• SA – Sharing under the same conditions : Adaptations of the content must be granted the same license as the original content
• NC – No commercial use
• ND- No modification

It is possible to combine these licenses (for example, CC-by-SA-NC).

The author of the work must be cited in all cases and in all combinations, in accordance with moral rights (which are inalienable and perpetual).

Permission to use the work is granted free of charge and on a non-exclusive basis.

In HAL, it is possible to select a licence for deposited content using the metadata License.

Resources:

• The Creative Commons License Chooser asks you a series of questions to help you select the licence that best suits your needs.
• The CIRAD website explains all the licenses.