Inria has had a long-standing involvement in the open access movement. It was an early signatory of the Berlin declaration and as soon as April 2005, it officially set its own portal (HAL-Inria ) on the national HAL platform and recommended that all publications from its research teams should be deposited there.

In 2006, being a signatory to the national agreement on open archiving, it accelerated its involvement in designing additional deposit, presentation and dissemination services to the HAL platform at the benefit of its researchers.

In the recent period, identifying how difficult it was to work in collaborative partnership with publishers (private, but also scientific associations) in defining new publishing business and editorial models, it has decided to issue in 2013 a deposit mandate for all published full texts, whereby HAL-Inria becomes the only source of information for all reporting and assessment activities of its researchers, teams and research centres.

Going even further, Inria is now engaging forces in experimenting new publication frameworks. It is thus involved in the Episciences initiative, which aims at creating a certification environment coupled to HAL, with reduced overhead costs and maximal dissemination efficiency.