Our presentation is centred on the description of the French higher education and research environment and the way it has developed in the scientific and technical information domain, up the recent presentation of the national open science policy by Minister Frédérique Vidal in July 2018. We will show that the focus on identifying a public service to universities and research institutions has lead to the setting up of centralised and coordinated services and decision-making processes that have put us in a strong position in the context of the on-going negotiations that are taking place with several monopolistic publishers. After a quick presentation of the general landscape, we will focus on the actual technical infrastructures that are currently in place and in particular how the existence of a national (cheap and efficient) publication repository has facilitated the development of a green open access orientation in the country. We will also present the general political support we have in this respect, with both the “Loi pour une République Numérique” (with articles related to open access and TDM) and the multi-institutional call of Jussieu aiming at providing a basis for an in-depth change of the publication eco-system. As an example of a concrete implementation of such policies, we will detail the open access strategy of Inria, which has had a deposit mandate in HAL since several years.