About 150 researchers and staff from 141 scientific journals mobilized against the future multi-year research programming law deposited this Tuesday "white pages" before the Ministry of Higher Education and Research in Paris. "It's been 5 or 10 years that there have been reforms in higher education and research, that long-term jobs are destroyed, that we are subject to managerial requirements," explains Laure Bereni, sociologist, research director at CNRS.
We are now 140 journals in struggle !! đź‘Źđź‘Ź
At 1 p.m. in front of MESRI (1 rue Descartes, Paris 5) to count us loud and clear!
All in black to say "no to white pages" 📖⚫️ pic.twitter.com/Ik5bkbWuMm
“Our working conditions are deteriorating rapidly and the upcoming law will complete this movement. It is the drop of water that overflows the vase, ”she added. For the most part dressed in black, the demonstrators held up placards representing the covers of human and social science journals crossed out with a red stripe "science in danger".
Inability to work, produce and publish
They deposited in front of the grid of the ministry notebooks filled with blank pages "to materialize the impossibility of working, producing and publishing knowledge if the coming reforms continue to destroy the public research infrastructures". Prime Minister Édouard Philippe announced in February 2019 the launch of a multi-year programming law for research. Initially scheduled for late 2019, the bill has still not been introduced.
Three working groups had submitted their preparatory work in September and Frédérique Vidal, Minister of Research, has since received the unions. "The future law will strike us a fatal blow, it will lead to massive casualization of the research and higher education professions, it will increasingly subordinate research to political and managerial ends, it will undermine the foundations of top research level ”, dreads Laure Bereni.
Soon reviews to assess?
Since January, many journals have been "fighting" against the future law, as well as on pension reform, such as "Acts of social science research", created by Pierre Bourdieu, the "Annales", a benchmark journal in history. and social sciences, but also Politix, Geneses, or journals on music, art history or archeology.
These publications participate in the evaluation, production and dissemination of knowledge, argue the researchers. They fear that in the future these journals “will only be used to evaluate”, according to Fabrice Virgili, research director at CNRS and member of the editorial board of the journal “Clio. Women, gender, history ”.
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