This paper describes the Centre for Direct Scientific Communication (CCSD) of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and focuses more on the “container” rather that on the “content”. Dedicated to open access and the archiving of scientific publications, the centre has a threefold mission: creation of full-text international databases, self-archiving by scientists, long-term preservation. To achieve this mission, the centre relies on two servers, HAL for articles and TEL for theses, and on its mirror sites for ArXiv and Physnet. The underlying technology used is the Eprint technology adapted to French. The centre also relies strongly on its collaboration with ArXiv at Cornell, CERN in Geneva and INIST and the MathDoc network in France.