ESAFORM conferences would not happen without all the efforts of the Board of Directors of the association. For 24 years, without any salary, the members of the board give time and energy to launch the annual conference and new actions to fill the association objectives. We build a community and we offer networking opportunities. Friendship emerges between all these scientists who gather years after years. I thank my colleagues for the opportunity of being chairwoman of ESAFORM 2021. I organized ESAFORM in 2001 and it is a real pleasure to organize it again, in 2021. Let us be flexible even if I would have prefered to see you not on a screen and to share the progresses of Liege city in 20 years. Did you had a look at the touristic Liege visit?
I thank Céline Dizier of AIM who worked hard to find solutions to organize this conference and to follow my suggestions to give not only a scientific content but also to provide some social links within this pandemic time.
I had mixed feelings about giving ESAFORM money to a commercial editor as during those 23 years of proceedings, ESAFORM board could not succeed to build a long term partnership for them. Edition world is changing, authors are not happy to pay to read in classical journals and to pay again to publish in Open Access approach in the same journals or other ones sometimes far from being “fair”. Each year, the conference organizers have to fight with template problems; ghost characters to provide to the chosen editor “clean” files and sometimes get anyway delay for proceeding publication. The ESAFORM board as well as the Uliege library team followed me in choosing PoPuPs platform to host the ESAFORM 2021 proceedings. Eight scientists of my team and the one of Anne Mertens discovered the edition work.
Ehssen Betaieb, Chantal Bouffioux, Olivier Dedry, Jocelyn Delahaye, Laurent Duchêne, Seifallah El Fetni, Tran Hoang Son, Hélène Morch.
I want to thank them for their effort. A special thank you to Bernard Pochet, who is the responsible of the PoPuPs platform development. His team and himself helped and guided us. It was not expected, that my colleagues and me would be the ones checking the new version of the platform. If for the long term proceeding visibility and quality, it is a good step, it generated some delay and unexpected work. ESAFORM 2021 Proceedings is a step in the big adventure to give to scientists a path to diffuse their scientific progress not based on purely commercial rules. The ESAFORM board will decide after evaluation the future of this solution within our association. In any case, the capacity of a university library to support Open Access has been advertised, I hope such an idea will find its way.
After reading all these acknowledgement, you will find here on 20th April 2021 the missing words of our little game.
What about trying collaboration and harmony against competition and chaos, when the challenge is to prepare a better world for the next generations, let us begin within ESAFORM….
