One major issue with HAL is that they accepted (under political/hierarchical pressure) to host only references without the actual paper PDF. So now its archive

One major issue with HAL is that they accepted (under political/hierarchical pressure) to host only references without the actual paper PDF. So now its archive is filled with bibliographic references without any article archived paper. It’s totally counter to its original purpose, and was implemented for researchers to be able to fulfill the internal CNRS mandate to list their paper on HAL without needing to actually host the paper there.