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 Syndicat National de l'Édition (SNE) and leads the Open Science working group of the Groupement Français des Industries de l'Information (gf2I), of which he is also vice-president.

After initial experience in the publishing industry (notably at Éditions Gallimard) and in the deployment of document technologies (Archimed), I was lucky enough to meet the team behind the Cairn project in 2005. info: 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 house and pioneer in the development of the first eBook formats, and François Gèze, former director of La Découverte publishing house, who was our chairman until his death in 2023.

Things then moved very quickly, with the gradual development of the institutional licensing model, 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 some forty people, and is involved in fields as varied as IT development, structuring and digital enrichment of works, typesetting and paper production, translation, audiovisual production, data analysis and international promotion of the publications entrusted to us.