Laurent Romary
Director of Scientific Culture and Information
Laurent Romary has been appointed Director of Culture and Scientific Information, on January 1st, 2022.
Laurent Romary has been an Inria research director since 2001. During his years of research in computational linguistics and digital humanities, he developed a strong interest in the standardisation and sharing of open linguistic data, and identified the need to implement shared infrastructures in the service of open science.
He set up and chaired a standardisation committee on linguistic resources within ISO, played a leading role in the Text Encoding Initiative consortium, the main international initiative for text data standardisation, and founded and directed until 2018 the European infrastructure DARIAH ERIC dedicated to digital methods in the humanities.
Laurent Romary has also been involved since 2005 in the definition and implementation of scientific information policies within several research organisations: the CNRS, as director of scientific information under the general direction of Bernard Larrouturou, the Max Planck Society in Germany, where he founded the Max Planck Digital Library, and of course Inria, as advisor for scientific information and publishing.
During these years, he has worked for the development of open science by initiating sometimes ambitious policies in the field of scientific publications. For example, he contributed to anchor the central role of HAL as a referencing framework for CNRS publications in 2005, negotiated a total Open Access agreement for all researchers of the Max Planck Society with Springer in 2007, or, for Inria, contributed to the centralised management of publication fees and to the policy of systematic deposit in HAL. In these two areas, Inria is now taken as an example by many research institutions and universities.
Finally, Laurent Romary has been involved in numerous initiatives, particularly at European level, which have helped to shape the open science landscape: the European PEER project on the massive deposit of author manuscripts in open archives, the group of European experts that prefigured what would later become RDA and EOSC (with the famous Riding the wave report), participation in the OpenAire scientific committee, as well as in numerous think tanks or field missions linked to the definition of policies, but also of tools for open science.