Thomas Parisot

Deputy Managing Director of the Cairn.info platform, Thomas Parisot plays an active role in the work of the academic group of the French Publishers' Association (SNE) and leads the Open Science working group of the French Alliance for the Information Industry (gf2I), of which he is also President.

After initial experience in publishing (notably at Éditions Gallimard) and in the deployment of document technologies, I was lucky enough to meet the team behind the Cairn.info project in 2005. They were: Marc Minon, an economist at the University of Liège who was working on the integration of new information and communication technologies in the publishing sector; Jean-Baptiste de Vathaire, former technical director of the PUF printing works and a pioneer in the development of the first eBook formats; and François Gèze, former director of La Découverte publishing house, who was our President until 2023.

Things then moved very quickly, with the gradual development of the institutional licensing model, which is still offered today to university libraries in 70 countries, the signing of agreements with over 500 publishers for the digital distribution of humanities and social science journals and books, and the development of increasingly varied distribution formats (videos, dossiers, reading lists, etc.).

Since Marc Minon's retirement in 2020, I have been working with Jean-Baptiste de Vathaire to manage the Cairn.info team, which now numbers around forty people and covers a wide range of areas including IT development, the structuring and digital enhancement of works, typesetting and paper production, translation, audiovisual production, data analysis and the international promotion of the publications entrusted to us.