The workshop on Sunday morning of the Eurozine conference in Paris that I took part in dealt with digital publishing — between cultural and academic practices. Several projects were presented:

Cairn is a French-Belgian company, launched in 2005, a private-public partnership, an initiative from the publishing world that is focussing on French online content. The project can be both free and chargable. Most magazines move their content into a freely available archive after 3-5 years.

Revues.org is a French speaking has 100 journals online and is so busy right now that its got another 50 journals in the waiting line, supporting social science and humanities. It is an initiative that comes from the journals and the researchers themselves. Revues.org has developed its own CMS, calander service and blog service (hypothese.org). 50 of their journals are fully open access and 20 of them made it into the Lund open access journal index.

www.persee.fr (not present) is the initiative of the French content libraries.

Now over to the debate. There is a MyJournal desire. Where does my journal differ from others? This is a key question for editors and publishers. What generation do I focus on? Is the emphasize on the international arena? In short, what is the unique personality of the magazine? CSS style sheets are given the possibility to personalize the journals while keeping the content in a universal standard.  There seems to be a difference between those initiatives that concentrate on the storage of digital content and those that want to actively engage with the readership.

Then Gloria Origgi of interdisciplines.org spoke. She is an Italian philosopher, based in Paris at the CNRS, who works on trust and reputation. The old system of ranking the reputation of academics are still in place but are crumbling from the inside. What is necessary is a Facebook for academic activities. There is a website for this now called Liquid Publication, which promotes new ways of working outside of writing academic papers. This could be one of the ways to get rid of Publish or Perish logic. The paper is still at the centre of the digital publishing. This initiative wants to question the dominance of the current format and centrality of the academic paper. One of the new cultural practices that can be introduced is the testimony. We start to use technologies to annotate information. Think of the cameras on the mobile phone. What is necessary is that the academic involvement in blogs etc. is fully recognized. The obsession of measuring performance only through academic papers needs to be openly criticized. It would be timely (my suggestion) to unleash a social movement against academic paperism so that other forms of academic knowledge will also be valued and appreciated.

In my short remark I emphasized the necessity for journals to experiment with different formats and gave the floor to Open Mute from London that using print on demand and is currently developing More is More, an alternative book distribution model in which my institute will participate as soon as it is fully operational (scheduled for April 2009).