Aix Marseille Université's proactive open access strategy, initiated in 2014, has just been rewarded with another victory. The symbolic barrier of 100,000 full-text deposits in the HAL AMU open archive was reached on 24/11/2025. This excellent result confirms that open science is now an integral part of the university community's practices. It adds to the establishment's remarkable position in the Open Science Barometer, with a scientific publication openness rate of 80% (+10 points above the national average). The same is true at international level, since in 2024 amU ranked 54th in the Leiden ranking for self-archiving of publications ("green path" or "green open access").
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The advantage of full text over the "dry" record - i.e. the bibliographic references of a publication alone - lies in the fact that it contributes directly to the influence and dissemination of research produced within amU, particularly among audiences requiring easy access to the work of the institution's researchers and teacher-researchers. In 2024, full-text documents in HAL AMU generated over 7 million downloads.
This success is the fruit of a long-term policy led by the university's Research vice-president and Open Science project manager. It is implemented at operational level by the SCD (University Libraries) which, from the outset, in conjunction with the DRV (Direction de la Recherche et de la Valorisation), has structured and maintained HAL AMU, as well as raising awareness, training and supporting the institution's lecturers, researchers and doctoral students in filing in the open archive, and more broadly in the challenges of open science.
The home page of the HAL AMU portal, Aix Marseille Université's open archive, which hosts the university's scientific output deposited by its researchers and teacher-researchers.
The progress of the open archive is also supported by the policy of amU Éditions, which encourages the scientific community to disseminate articles from journals published within the institution in open archives thanks to a legal framework that is more favorable than current legislation (Law for a Digital Republic of October 7, 2016).
amU's upward trajectory in open science, which has gradually extended to the sharing of research data, codes and software linked to scientific publications, was rewarded in January 2025 with the "data workshop" label awarded by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research. The next step will be to implement amU's open science roadmap, drawn up by a dedicated steering committee and validated in July 2025. This operational phase will focus on continuously improving the quality of metadata and repositories archived in HAL AMU. Particular emphasis will be placed on ensuring that the affiliation of researchers, lecturers and research structures to amU complies with the international ORCID and ROR identifiers, in order to make articles easy to find, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR principles).
Article published on Monday, November 24, 2025.
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