Scientific publications

The University of Montpellier offers support for managing scientific publications and publishing in Open Access.

The HAL-UM portal

Opened in 2017, the HAL-UM portal aims to promote the institution's scientific output through various initiatives:

Help with depositing in HAL (see webinar)

Entering lists of publications (researchers or laboratories)

Incentive to submit the full text

Help with creating IdHal and CV-HAL (see webinar)

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

Training courses

Coordination of a network of advisors

Open Access journals with APCs

The majority of scientific publications, often funded by public money, are accessible through subscriptions to publishers. The amounts paid by higher education institutions and research organizations to access 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 articles to be published in open access after payment of APCs. APCs (Article Processing Charges) are therefore publication fees charged by publishers to finance the open access distribution of scientific articles.

The University of Montpellier is a signatory to a number of these agreements and therefore covers the costs associated with open access publication of articles in these journals. Subscriptions and APCs are managed by the shared documentation service (SCD).

If you are recognized as UM staff and corresponding author, you can benefit from these agreements. Find the list of publishers and journals concerned here.
For more information: Contact the Open Science and Research Support team at the SCD.

The APC model is very costly: in France, APC costs have risen 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 viewed on the OpenAPC platform.

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

Tools for publishing in open access without APCs 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 authors and readers, thanks to upstream institutional funding). To find diamond journals in your field, visit the DOAJ website.

Here are a few examples of "diamond" journals based on the evaluation of preprints and/or incorporating open peer review into their review process:

Epi-journals hosted by Episciences

The Peer Community Journal, from PCI

Reviews on the Scipost platform

For more information, watch the webinar "How to find a journal to publish in Open Access" or contact the Open Science and Research Support team at the SCD.

Signature policy

The signature charter for scientific publications by authors belonging to the research structures of the University of Montpellier was validated in 2016 and updated in March 2021. Standardized signatures are crucial for identifying publications by the University and research organizations in bibliometric surveys, evaluations, and international rankings.