Marin Dacos, lauréat de la médaille de l’innovation CNRS 2016. © Frédérique PLAS/CNRS Photothèque

Press release: Marin Dacos receives the CNRS Innovation Medal 2016

By awarding Marin Dacos the Innovation Medal, the CNRS is shining the spotlight on a society-oriented academic dissemination tool for the first time.

In less than two decades, Marin Dacos and his team have built an international infrastructure for the dissemination of the humanities and social sciences, one that is both by and for the research community, but also open to the general public. By combining the human and social sciences with high-level information technology, this instrument to democratise access to knowledge represents a major contribution to the advance of the digital humanities.

OpenEdition, a knowledge dissemination portal

The OpenEdition infrastructure has developed over the years and now includes four platforms: Revues.org (430 academic journals), Calenda (30 000 events and calls), Hypotheses (1 500 blogs/research blogs), and finally OpenEdition Books. This last platform, which is home to 54 publishers and almost 3 000 online books, was building using Equipex funding from Investments for the Future, obtained in 2012. The portal as a whole received over 60 million visits in 2015, making it a leading actor in this domain in Europe. 80% of the portal’s content is in open access, without any technical or monetary barriers to access, which explains OpenEdition’s success as a knowledge democratisation tool.

Marin Dacos, a public knowledge entrepreneur

OpenEdition is an endeavour which for Marin Dacos began in 1999, when he created Revues.org. After joining the CNRS in 2007 after a spell at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Marin Dacos won the CNRS Cristal Medal in 2010, a distinction that aims to recognise engineers’ work. With Pierre Mounier he co-authored an authoritative work in this domain: L’édition électronique (La Découverte, 2010). The Innovation Medal awarded in 2016 is above all a sign of the dynamic he has been able to instil at the Cléo (Centre for Open Electronic Publishing), the establishment he founded and which runs OpenEdition. The Cléo is a CNRS mixed services unit affiliated to the EHESS, Aix-Marseille University and the University of Avignon.

CNRS Innovation Medals

Awarded since 2011 by a jury made up of the high-level CNRS Collège de Direction, representatives of the CNRS’s partnerships and the Ministry of National Education, Higher Education and Research, as well as personalities from the business world, each year the Innovation Medals are bestowed on three or four researchers and honour “exceptional academic research that has led to remarkable technological, therapeutic or societal innovation”. The Innovation Medal is the most prestigious medal awarded by the CNRS after the CNRS Gold Medal, ahead of the Silver, Bronze and Cristal Medals. Twenty-one researchers have received the award since 2011, in the most varied of disciplines. This is only the second time – after Esther Duflo (developmental economics) in 2011 – that a specialist in the humanities and social sciences has won the prize.

To find out more

• OpenEdition portal http://openedition.org
• “Knowledge is a weapon: Innovation Medal 2016 – Acceptance Speech”, Blogo-numericus, 20 June 2016, https://bn.hypotheses.org/11766  French version : “Le savoir est une arme. Discours de remise de la médaille de l’innovation 2016”, by Marin Dacos, Blogo-numericus, 16 June 2016, https://bn.hypotheses.org/11728
• “Les as de l’innovation”, Journal du CNRS, 11 May 2016, https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/articles/les-de-linnovation
• “Marin Dacos, directeur d’OpenEdition”, film directed by Alexandra Ena and produced by CNRS Images, 2:59, June 2016, https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4flpcd_marin-dacos-directeur-d-openedition_school
• CNRS Innovation Medals, http://www.cnrs.fr/fr/recherche/prix/medaillesinnovation.htm
  

Contact

Marin Dacos

Director the Cléo, Marseille

marin.dacos@openedition.org

Twitter: @openmarin

Tel: +33 (0)4 13 55 03 39