Jacques Lafait is a physicist. He has directed the Laboratoire d’Optique des Solides (Solid State Optics Laboratory) at University Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC) as well as the CNRS Multidisciplinary Research Network ‘Couleur et Matériaux à Effets Visuels’ (Colour and Materials with Visual Effects). He has mainly carried out research into the applications of nanomaterials for solar energy and colour.

In 2009, he became involved in what is now known as ‘open science’ and for 8 years was the documentation and libraries project leader under the authority of the President of the UPMC. He was made a CNRS emeritus research director in 2010, took part in drafting the Law for a Digital Republic in the framework of the Digital Scientific Library (BSN 4 and 7) and was the coordinator of the Jussieu Call. He was involved in founding the Committee for Open Science and was a member of its Permanent Secretariat (SPSO). He was a co-pilot of the Building Bibliodiversity project-group which is part of the Committee’s Publications College. This group notably produced Exemplarity Criteria for publications and platforms used for National Open Science Fund (FNSO) calls for projects.

Hélène Lowinger is a scientific information and publishing specialist.

She was head of the documentation centre at the French National Institute for Transport and Safety Research (Inrets) in Arcueil, then of the Inria’s STI department at Saclay. She is now the coordinator of the Inria’s scientific publishing division.

She has been very involved in open science issues for many years, working first on the promotion of the Hal platform before training in new publishing models and then working for the Episciences platform (open access journals).

In 2009, she organised the Berlin7 Conference on Open Access in Paris, took part in the organisation of the STI-Inria seminars from 2011 to 2016 and is the scientific co-editor of the publications related to these seminars.