1Nowadays, 99,000 scientific documents are stored in IRD’s institutional archives, a hybrid digital and paper collection of which 66,000 open-access PDF documents were downloaded nearly three million times in 2018, essentially in French-speaking Africa countries, led by Côte d’Ivoire, Algeria and Cameroon.

2This wide-ranging digital corpus, to which nearly 3,000 new documents are added every year, is multidisciplinary (tropical soil science, hydrology, oceanography, human and social sciences, health, botany, etc.) and ensures international exposure for the partnered research conducted by IRD and its partners in the Global South over the past 75 years.

3In 2018, this documentary collection was awarded the “Collection of Excellence” certification by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, thus recognising its value with regard to both heritage and science.

4Searchable from a multilingual promotional website (French, Spanish and English) or directly via general purpose search engines, the Horizon database meets the requirements of the National Plan for Open Science and is also harvested by major scientific information infrastructures such as Open Aire and Base, which disseminate the results of partnered research for development throughout the world.

5Furthermore, IRD has an extensive library of images built up over several decades of research in the Global South. A unique iconographic fund featuring more than 50,000 photographs of Africa, Asia, Latin America, Oceania and overseas territories, the Indigo photo library stores and disseminates photographs taken and captioned by IRD researchers. These pictures taken on the ground or in laboratories cover a broad spectrum of disciplines: Earth and life sciences, health sciences, human and social sciences. They are accessible to everyone: journalists, publishers, researchers, teachers, students and private citizens.