French Open Archive Screensaver
The French Open Archive screensaver shows the newest submissions to HAL, France's national open archive, key-less. It's free, runs in your browser, and ESC exits.
Live preview
Press ESC to leave fullscreen. Settings are saved in your browser only.
How the French Open Archive screensaver works
The saver reads the source described above and draws it on a canvas — no account, no tracking.
The newest submissions to HAL, France's national open archive, key-less. Deposit is mandatory at many French institutions, so the feed is a genuinely broad cross-section — talks, posters, theses, books — rather than a journal table of contents. Mostly in French.
It refreshes on a schedule, so what you see stays current.
Colours and any options can be changed in settings; nothing is stored beyond your own browser.
What HAL is and who deposits in it
HAL, short for Hyper Articles en Ligne, is France’s national open archive for research output. It began in 2001 at the École normale supérieure and is now run by the CCSD (Centre pour la communication scientifique directe), which also runs the Episciences journal platform and the Sciencesconf conference tool. Documents are uploaded either by an author or by an authorised person, and described with metadata.
What you see scroll past is therefore not a journal feed but a cross-section of what academics produce. Documents do not need to have been published or intended for publication, so the archive can hold preprints, conference papers, posters, theses and book chapters alongside final articles. Many records are in French, some in English, and some in other languages. Fields such as the document type and the research domain are what separate a physics preprint from a linguistics thesis.
A record appearing here means a deposit was made, not that the item has been vetted. Deposit is not peer review, so drafts and final papers can sit side by side, and the record itself is the place to check what kind of document it is.
A worked example
The newest submissions to HAL, France's national open archive, key-less. Deposit is mandatory at many French institutions, so the feed is a genuinely broad cross-section — talks, posters, theses, books — rather than a journal table of contents. Mostly in French.
Settings & tips
- Accent and Background recolour the display.
- Every value on screen comes from the live source — nothing is simulated.
- Press ESC to leave fullscreen.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this real data?
- Yes — it comes from the source named on this page and is refreshed on a schedule.
- Is a key needed?
- No. This source is fully key-less.
- Is it free?
- Yes — free, no download, in your browser.
- Is everything in HAL peer reviewed?
- No. HAL does not require documents to have been published, so it holds material at different stages. Check the record for the document type and any publication details.
- Why is so much of it in French?
- HAL is a French national archive, and many deposits come from researchers at French institutions, who write in French as well as in English and other languages.