Dear members, colleagues, and friends,
The Mécamat association is joining forces with national research organizations to overhaul our scientific publication practices.
For some time now, our community has been questioning the scientific publication model. The latter is currently dominated by a few private publishers incurring uncontrollable costs to authors in the form of institutional subscriptions or author-payer model, the latter becoming more prevalent.
This situation is no longer economically sustainable; it is ethically questionable. The impact on public finances is such that many large research organizations have recently discontinued their subscriptions. This renunciation sheds light onto the pernicious nature of the current system: publicly funded research, conducted, written up, evaluated and edited by researchers, who then cede their rights to for-profit private publishing companies and must ultimately buy access to their own work.
The Mécamat association supports the creation of an EPI-Journal in the Materials Mechanics area.
An alternative model must be put in place immediately, restoring research-community control over its scientific publication. As a scholarly society, we wish to assume our responsibilities and give our full support to the initiative of an EPI-Journal in our community (https://epijournalinmechanics.github.io).
We invite those of us whose scientific reputation is no longer in question to actively participate in this future journal: editorial committee, proofreading activity, submission of papers, support posters. We also invite major research organizations, the Academy of Sciences, the National Committee of the CNRS, National Committees of Universities and equivalent public, state or industrial research organizations to publicly support it.
For the Board of Directors of MECAMAT.