Roundtable for the 2020 CSDH/SCHN congress : Journals in the digital age

As part of the 2020 CSDH/SCHN congress, which was held virtually because of the COVID-19 related situation, the CRC organized a roundtable entitled Journals in the digital age: thinking new models of publishing in the social sciences and humanities.

In his short story Wearable books, Michael Pidd proposes a dystopian academic world where digital publishing technologies have become a system for controlling, tracing and standardizing research and the epistemological models on which it is based. In this world Pidd imagines revolutionary academics who, in order to guarantee freedom of thought and the possibility of the existence of several research paradigms, decide to return to paper. Indeed, if at the beginning of its development, the Web seemed the promise of a space of plurality, differences and freedom of expression - let's not forget Barlow's declaration of independence of cyberspace in 2000 - today, largely due to the growing impact of GAFAM, we are witnessing a standardization of models and a concentration of power in the hands of a handful of companies. In the world of research this is manifested in a dominant language, crystallized formats, a sclerotic editorial chain, a problematic but questionable system of legitimization, and a growing importance, even in the humanities, of impact factors and quantitative methods for assessing the quality of research.