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 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.

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