Report of the round table "The future of publication platforms" of the Revue3.0 2025 plenary meeting

This round table was moderated by Rémy Besson, with Suzanne Beth for Érudit, Sandra Guigonis for OpenEdition, Mireille Lacombe for Réseau Circé, Dominique Roux for Métopes and Marcello Vitali-Rosati for Revue3.0.

Presentations of the different structures and their current challenges

OpenEdition aims to open up and share knowledge in the human and social sciences (SHS). A publicly-funded national research infrastructure since 2016, it implements French public policies on open science. It provides 4 mature platforms for different types of formats: journals, books, scientific event communication and blogging (Hypotheses notebooks), whose content is highly structured and tagged in XML-TEI (pivot format), follows the FAIR principles (easily found, accessible, interoperable, reusable) and whose metadata uses a controlled thesaurus and vocabulary. The challenge for OE today is to maintain and develop this infrastructure. While it cannot in itself constitute a space for experimentation and prototyping, it does aim to respond satisfactorily to the evolution of editorial practices desired by the SHS research communities. For example, OE is currently working to expose datasets directly on Nakala, which in turn will be able to expose OpenEdition articles citing its datasets.

For Érudit, the current challenge is in particular to support non-commercial Canadian journals, starting by providing them with long-term hosting. To this end, we are working on the XML structuring of our content, personalized support for our journals and their distribution, from university libraries to Google Scholar. Érudit works closely with the Public Knowledge Project and its OJS editorial platform, as well as with Réseau Circé, to raise awareness of the challenges facing journals independent of major commercial publishers, in a vision of the journal dominated by the practices of the natural sciences and medicine, and a context of commercialization of research. Érudit is currently considering the integration of new editorial practices, with alternative forms of publication to standard scholarly articles - such as videographic essays - as well as improving data conversion and circulation between Érudit and OpenEdition to avoid double submissions.

The Métopes team, led by the Université de Caen-Normandie, is proposing a work organization to structure the editing of SHS content, making XML-TEI a pivotal format from which to produce the various editing formats. It is working to train the SHS editorial community in XML editing, flow annotation and formatting with InDesign or LaTeX, following the principle of single source publishing (one source, many outputs). One of today’s challenges is to differentiate between types of data and metadata according to discipline, and to think about the links between publications and data. The main challenge remains to enrich the flow of content and data manipulation of texts in the social sciences and humanities.

Discussions between participants and with the members in the room

Mireille Lacombe, business analyst for the Réseau Circé, raises the question of the place of pre-publications and continuous publication on these different platforms. For Dominique Roux, it’s a question of an additional schema; Suzanne Beth asserts that Érudit is currently taking the lead in integrating this type of publication and practice; Sandra Guigonis, for her part, explains that this fairly common practice could find an answer in “continuous rubrics”.

Emmanuel Chateau-Dutier, professor of digital museology at the Université de Montréal and member of Revue 3.0, takes the floor to propose the idea of deplatformization, which in his view would not mean abandoning the infrastructure.  "Should we free ourselves from this stock? Do we just need to find the journals in a stable, distributed network?" - This, he believes, would run counter to commercial publishers and their centralization. Marcello Vitali-Rosati agrees, proposing to invest in “digital literacy” to imagine local models specific to each journal, which could however be based on common formats and indexing. He poses a question to Open Edition and Érudit: "What role can you play in this world?"

For Sandra Guigonis, the idea of circulating information via a federated infrastructure is conceivable. However, this is a non-trivial technical issue. PeerTube, for example, is a success story in this respect, although it does require a certain human cost for maintenance, as well as a certain literacy to develop one’s own instance. For Suzanne Beth, there’s a problem of idealization in Marcello Vitali-Rosati’s suggestion: journal directors don’t have the knowledge and skills of the people in this room, they don’t know what’s at stake in the digital world. Emmanuel Chateau-Dutier points out that what journals need is infrastructure support, as well as flexible publication options, and Marcello-Vitali-Rosati agrees, saying that the mission of platforms is above all sustainable access - digital expertise that is not the responsibility of publishers and authors. At the end of the discussion, Sandra Guigonis mentions the journal incubator initiatives in France, which may or may not adopt the OpenEdition model, but with which OE nevertheless intends to network: she affirms the need for dialogue with these initiatives.

Complementarity can be found between publishing platforms such as OE and Érudit, centralized archives such as HAL - which Dominique Roux points out is not about publishing - and a distributed publishing infrastructure of journals.