Ph. D. in history of Science (1974, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA). Professor at the Université de Montéral since 1973, first at the Institut d'histoire et socio-politique des sciences and now in the Département de littérature comparée. I became interested in electronic publishing in the late '80's when I began thinking about what an electronic journal would be like. Thanks to help from Apple Canada, my Univeristy and several granting agencies, I was able to launch the first Canadian scholarly Journal, Surfaces, in the Fall of 1991. It has now published 9 volumes and is still going on.
In parallel, I began publishing on the topic, and got involved with various activities, some of which are defunct (such as the Virtuoso Project in Canada) and others are very much alive (I am on the Steering Committee of the Canadian National Site License Project and I chair their Advisory Board; I am on the Steering and Strategic Committees of the Networked Digital Libraries for Theses and Dissertations, and on the Program Committee of ETD'02 to be held late May in Provo, Utah).
I have lectured extensively on electronic publishing, most notably at the national Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Md. (Leiter Lecture, 1998) and at the ARL Membership meeting in Toronto in May 2001. The latter conference has been published as a short essay that can be read or downloaded in the ARL site (http://www.arl.org). I am widely identified with the open archive philosophy, but also with calls to revise the evaluation process of scientific papers and I have tried to help SPARC's battle to create change and competition.
Most recently, in December 2001, I was invited by the Soros Foundation to participate in the meeting that has given rise to the Budapest initiative (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml). I am slated to intervene in various conferences, most notably at the Society of Scholarly Publishers meeting in Boston at the end of May, at LIBER in Grax, in July, at IFLA in Glasgow, in August, and at OECD-IMHE at the end of August in Paris.
Other areas of interest include the Internet and the relationship between arts and technology. I was recently named "Fleck Fellow" by the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada. My book La Planète Cyber. Internet et cyberespace, published in Paris by Gallimard in 1996, has been translated into Italian and a second edition under the title Internet. Le monde en réseau, has been issued in 2000. This volume has been a minor best seller in the French-speaking world (ca. 150,000 copies sold or ditributed). I am presently working on a book for Presses universitaires de France with the tentative title of: Les nouveaux contours de la publication scientifique. Livres et revues d'Internet. This book should come out next year.