Scientific publications

The University of Montpellier offers support for the management of scientific publications and Open Access publication.

The HAL-UM portal

Opened in 2017, the HAL-UM portal aims to promote the scientific production of the establishment, through various actions:

Help with depositing in HAL (see the webinar )

Entry of publication lists (researchers or laboratories)

Incentive to submit the full text

Help with the creation of IdHal and CV-HAL (see the webinar )

Administration of the HAL-UM portal (repositories, collections, deduplication, etc.)

Training

Animation of a network of referents

Open Access Journals with APC

The majority of scientific publications, often funded by public money, are accessible by subscription from publishers. The amounts paid by higher education institutions and research organizations to access the content are very high and constantly increasing.

“Transformative agreements”, negotiated in France by the Couperin consortium, aim to move from a traditional subscription model to a model of publishing all articles in open access through the payment of APCs. Some publishers, without being fully committed to transformative agreements, allow the publication of articles in open access after payment of APCs. APCs (Article Processing Charges) are therefore publication fees requested by publishers to finance the dissemination of scientific articles in open access.

The University of Montpellier is a signatory to a number of these agreements and thus covers the costs associated with the open access publication of articles in these journals. The management of subscriptions and APCs is provided by the joint documentation service (SCD).

If you are recognized as a UM affiliated staff member and corresponding author, you can therefore benefit from these agreements. Find here the list of publishers and journals concerned .
For more information: Email APC managers

The APC model is very expensive: in France, APC fees have increased very sharply in recent years and projections for 2030 are alarming. At the local level, an estimate of APC expenses paid by the UM can be consulted on the OpenAPC platform .

In addition, the APC business model has encouraged the emergence of so-called "predatory" publishers. The latter charge APCs and publish articles after a minimal or non-existent review process. Their interest is purely economic and publishing with them can be detrimental to authors.

Tools for publishing open access without APC are presented in the toolkit below.

Diamond Open Access Journals

Unlike the APC-based model, it is possible to publish in Open Access without paying publication fees, by choosing so-called "diamond" journals (free for the author and the reader, thanks to upstream institutional funding). To find diamond journals in your field, go to the DOAJ website .

Here are also some examples of “diamond” journals based on the promotion of preprints and/or integrating Open peer-reviewing into their review process:

Epi-journals hosted by Episciences

The Peer Community Journal , from PCI

Scipost platform journals

To learn more, you can watch the webinar “How to find a journal to publish in Open Access” or contact us: Email HAL assistance

Charter of signatures

The charter of signatures of scientific publications of authors belonging to the research structures of the University of Montpellier was validated in 2016 and updated in March 2021. The challenge of a standardized signature is major for the identification of publications of the University and research organizations during bibliometric surveys, evaluations and international rankings.