Press Release – June 27th, 2014



PUF and Cairn.info Join Forces in a Project to Digitize and Make 2000 Research Publications Available Online.



Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) and Cairn.info have recently signed an agreement that is intended to further their existing partnership. Cairn.info already provides a platform for all the journals published by PUF (along with 360 other journals from more than 100 other French publishers), as well as all the current titles in the “Que sais-je” series of books. According to the terms of their new agreement, Cairn.info will, with the consent of the authors involved, make the full text of all the research publications in PUF’s outstanding catalogue of books available online.



This ambitious project will address over 2000 books, both collective research papers and monographs, representing the wealth and excellence of work undertaken in the humanities and social sciences in the French language. The online publication of these books is to be rolled out in several different phases until mid-July 2015. The first group of 300 titles should therefore go online from the beginning of July this year and will include titles from the “Epimethée,” “Philosophies,” and “Perspectives critiques” collections.



Besides the exceptional quality of the collections involved, this project boasts the three following features :

  • all these books will be converted in XML format, so that they can be read on Cairn.info in HTML. In particular, this will allow for the introduction of various high quality functionalities essential in any research work today, including detailed and structured research into the full text of the books concerned, the possibility of semantic reconciliation between different texts, the addition of co-citation links, etc. ;
  • in order to optimize availability, these papers will be published without DRM, except for “social” DRMs (watermarking);
  • the online publications will be marketed by Cairn.info, both through libraries, especially research libraries and those in higher education establishments (subscriptions to packages or “pick and choose”) as well as to individuals (“pay-per-view”).

The aim of this project is to improve the visibility and the availability of the PUF collections and to highlight in qualitative terms the works already provided by Cairn.info (titles from publishers such as Autrement, De Boeck, La Découverte, Erès, Editions de l’Eclat, Presses de Sciences Po, Quae, etc), in order to establish a comprehensive digital library of French language publications in the field of humanities and the social sciences.



About Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) – www.puf.com



Presses Universitaires de France is the leading French university publishing house and one of the most important higher education publishers in France. Founded in 1921, PUF offers a prominent and prestigious catalogue comprising more than 4000 current titles in all areas of the humanities: philosophy, psychology, law, sociology, literature, history, geopolitics, etc. As publisher of “Que sais-je?” the famous paperback encyclopedia, which is now over sixty years old and is translated worldwide, and “Quadrige” the prestigious collection including works by Bergson, Freud, Durkheim, Mauss, Bachelard and Deleuze, as well as historical dictionaries and scientific journals, PUF is also developing an ambitious project to publish essays by contemporary authors, thus adding to a substantial catalogue which is alrea dy a unique resource for reference and research.



About Cairn.info – www.cairn.info



With already more than 400 journals and 4000 works available, Cairn.info has become a major online resource for research in the field of humanities and social sciences. More than 850 libraries in 65 countries use the service worldwide, enabling their users easy and efficient access to a corpus of work that is representative of the dynamism and the quality of research being published in the French language.



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