19th Munin Conference on scholarly publishing
The Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing has a history going back to 2006. In 2006, the University of Tromsø got its institutional repository for publications. In connection with the launch of the repository, a seminar was organized at the end of November, looking at the effects of the Norwegian system for financing institutions, which was in part based upon the publishing volume (and quality) of the institutions. This seminar has evolved into the annual Munin conference.
The name “Munin” comes from Norse mythology. Munin is one of Odin’s ravens, who fly around the world to gather knowledge and come back to Odin to tell him all they saw (which is why Odin is the wisest of the gods). “Munin”, which means “memory”, was deemed to be a fitting name for an institutional repository, and the conference inherited that name.
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. 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, with “open” as an important aspect. See the list of our keynotes since the start in 2006 and the Archive for conference material from 2010.
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 UiT The Arctic University of Norway 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.
