The Munin Conference – some background

The Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing has a history going back to 2006. In connection with the official opening of Munin, the institutional repository of the University of Tromsø, two seminars were arranged. The first was in September marking the launch of Munin, the second was held in the end of November, looking at the effects of the Norwegian system for financing institutions in part based upon the publishing volume (and quality) of the institutions. This last seminar has evolved into the annual Munin conference.

In the years following 2006, the Munin Conference was held in Norwegian, often having a Norwegian focus, but gradually looking further and losing the local focus. From 2010 on the conference has been held in English only, previously we had some presentations in English and some in Norwegian. This all-English policy has enabled keynotes and other speakers to participate fully in the whole program, and to make Europe, not only Norway, the “market” for the conference.

Themes for the conferences have always been some aspect of scholarly/scientific publishing and communication, overwhelmingly with Open Access (OA) as an important aspect, but Open Access in itself has not been the only theme. Some of the themes for the conferences have been Entering the Next Stage (2013), New Trends in Scholarly Publishing (2012), Enhancing publications (2011), Open Access: The Competitive Advantage (2010), Time to review the peer review? (2009) and Money Talks: New institutional policies in scholarly publishing (2008). See the list of our keynotes since the start in 2006.

The Munin audience has partly been librarians working on OA and publishing issues from higher education libraries from the whole of Norway, partly research administrators from the same institutions, partly researchers and students from the University of Tromsø and – increasingly – librarians and research administrators from the Nordic countries and the rest of Europe. We would like to engage researchers to a larger extent than we have succeeded in doing so far – after all publishing is there to serve their needs – and to strengthen their participation in the conference.