Actually, approximately 2/3 of the PhD theses are submitted in digital format. All these files are transferred to
and preserved on a central server hosted by the French computer centre CINES. The author and/or the local
university can deposit the ETD on an institutional or another repository, for open access dissemination but there is
no mandatory policy for ETD or open access to ETD so far.More than 42,000 ETD are openly and freely available
on the national ETD platform TEL hosted by the French Centre for Direct Scientific Communication CCSD. The
format of TEL, as well as of many institutional repositories hosted by the CCSD, has been developed by the CCSD
(OAI-HAL) and is compliant with the Dublin Core and the OAI-PMH protocol. Yet, there is no direct link to the
rich MARC format or to TEF. For instance, the TEL formatrequires (with poor control)the elements institution,
language, advisor and French key words but not graduate school, field or jury members which are optional elements.
Another problem with TEL is that the central repository is not integrated into local institutional workflows. This
means that authors sometimes deposit another than the validated version of their PhD thesis. Both ABES and CCSD start to develop features compliant witha CRIS, such as unique identifiers for persons and organizations but there is
no national CRIS, and especially in the Higher Education sector very few organizations implemented their own
CRIS, while waiting for a recent CRIS initiative led by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research