
Connects to HAL, France's national open access repository for research publications. You get four tools: Solr-style search across the archive, single document retrieval by HAL ID, author lookup via free-text query, and research structure lookups for labs and departments. Useful when you need to pull French academic papers, trace authorship, or map institutional affiliations in European research. Runs over streamable HTTP through the Pipeworx gateway, which also offers an ask_pipeworx natural language wrapper if you'd rather skip manual tool calls. Part of a larger gateway that connects to 673+ data sources, so you can add just HAL or get the full suite.
HAL MCP — Hyper Articles en Ligne, the French national open archive of research output. Keyless.
Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1476+ live data sources.
search(query, fl?, fq?, rows?, start?, sort?) — Solr-style search across HALget(hal_id) — single document by HAL id (e.g. "hal-00001234")author(name|id) — author lookupstructure(query) — research structure (lab/department) lookuphttps://api.archives-ouvertes.fr/search/ (Solr-backed REST).
Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):
{
"mcpServers": {
"hal-fr": {
"url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/hal-fr/mcp"
}
}
}
tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/hal-fr/mcp returns the tools in the table
above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx,
discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the
gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a
single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the
pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and
is the authoritative answer for a given day.
This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a
scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via
ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a
second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without
them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth,
connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.
Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:
{
"mcpServers": {
"pipeworx": {
"url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
}
}
}
Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1476+ data sources. The
only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx
reaches all of them from either one.
Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:
ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Hal Fr data" })
The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.
MIT