20 Years of Commitment and Innovation in the Service of Open Science
In 2023, Persée celebrated its 20th anniversary. This milestone coincided with the publication of the one millionth document on the persee.fr portal, confirming the programme’s original mission: to provide open access to collections of heritage and contemporary scientific publications.
This activity report is not just about looking back, it is also about looking forward. Through the achievements of 2023, but also through the experiments and partnerships pursued this year, it shows the extent to which Persée has developed and diversified to meet the new uses and challenges of research.
Producing and Sharing
In 2023, Persée confirmed its role as a leading scientific library. The persee.fr portal recorded over 55 million visits and 750 million page views, highlighting its reach both in France and internationally. The “Perséides” collections also saw growing success, with nearly one million visits, notably for the “Archives Parlementaires de la Révolution Française” (ARCPA), which was enriched with 12,000 additional documents this year.
The diversification of collections and disciplines, supported by digitization programmes and strategic partnerships, has increased Persée’s overall range of publications. At the same time, significant work has been carried out on metadata to improve the referencing of scientific publications, with the addition of almost 19,000 article abstracts to the Crossref database, helping to enhance the visibility and quality of the data produced.
Moreover, the growing number of applications to join the portal, which has doubled since 2018, testifies to the continuing interest in the platform, and consolidates its position in the scientific dissemination ecosystem.
Collaboration and Training
Persée expanded its network in 2023. In terms of partnerships, the unit has strengthened its cooperation with libraries through the concerted digitization program led by CollEx-Persée, as well as with research teams via the Perséides collections. It has also continued its fruitful collaboration with the Prairial journal incubator and the University of Lille’s Library Services, which have been contributing to the portal for the past three years. Over 28,000 pages were produced this year by partners, as part of scientific or editorial projects.
Another key area of development was training. Through collaborations with universities and research centers, Persée actively participated in training students and professionals in information sciences and digital humanities.
Supporting and Innovating
Exploratory projects multiplied in 2023, particularly around experimenting with new methods of data enrichment and extraction, as well as integrating artificial intelligence into processing workflows. Efforts to improve OCR-produced text quality, achieving word recognition rates of over 95%, and automated image cleaning reflect a constant focus on enhancing data quality to provide researchers with high-quality corpora.
20 Years: looking back and looking ahead
The professional event organized to mark Persée’s 20th anniversary provided an opportunity to reflect on its commitment to open science and foster a collective discussion on new challenges related to digitization and corpus exploitation. Topics addressed during the event—such as publishers’ digital transition, FAIR data, and AI in corpus processing—highlighted the need for Persée to continue producing and innovating to meet the needs of the research community.
Download the full report here (PDF in French) :