The purpose of TEL (thèses-EN-ligne) is to facilitate the self archiving of thesis manuscripts, which are important documents for direct scientific communication between scientists. TEL is actually nothing but a particular ";environment" of HAL. It therefore has the same objective: make scientific documents available to scientists all around the world, rapidly and freely, but with a restriction to PHD thesis and habilitations (HDR, in countries where habilitations exist). CCSD does not make any scientific evaluation of the thesis that are submitted, since this is the responsibiliy of the university professors in the examination board.

After registering in TEL, every doctor can upload his/her thesis, but members of the laboratory (a librarian for instance) may also perform the task as soon as they have the agreement of the author. The document is then seen by a "verificator", who checks that the document indeed contains a thesis within the scientific domain chosen, and that the scientific and administrative informations that are provided look correct. Most of the time, the thesis becomes visible on TEL within 24 hours.

The thesis does not have to be recent; the upload of older thesis is encouraged, of course in so far as the electronic files are still available (scanned paper documents are also accepted, but not documents submitted to publisher copyright).

TEL is also accessible through OAI (Open Archives Initiative), tools and the OAI-PHM protocol, with the URL http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/oai

TEL est under the responsibility of CCSD, in collaboration with Cellule MathDoc, and is supported by the Société Française de Physique.

CCSD means "Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe". It is an Unité Propre de Service (UPS 2275) of the CNRS Institute within IN2P3 Centre de Calcul in Villeurbanne.