About Jean-Sébastien Caux
I am a strong believer in openness in scientific publishing. In 2016, I founded SciPost, a non-profit foundation which runs the SciPost.org two-way open access publication portal. Our global mission is simply to deprecate undue practices in the business of scientific publishing, put the control of the infrastructure back into the hands of scientists, while implementing a radically cost-slashing business model to radically reduce the publishing expenditures of universities and funding agencies worldwide.
My knowledge and expertise on publishing in general, and Open Access in particular, is extensive and covers all levels including preprints systems, editorial workflows, metadata handling, curation, archiving, metrification, together with Open Access advocacy in general.
On the technical level, I like "talking shop": I am the lead developer and implementer of the tech stack behind SciPost, and have a particular love for teaching machines how to be useful and put their strength at the service of a good cause. When it comes to Open Access, I definitely prefer "doing" above simply "talking".
For my day job, I am Professor of Low-Dimensional Quantum Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Amsterdam. My work focuses on applying advanced, nonperturbative theoretical methods to translate state-of-the-art mathematical concepts into concrete physical predictions for strongly-correlated systems in the fields of magnetism, cold atoms and quantum nanostructures.
After undergraduate studies in Montréal, I moved to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and obtained my doctorate in 1998. Following a postdoc at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, I returned to Oxford as Postdoctoral Fellow in All Souls College, finally landing in Amsterdam in 2003. I have had the privilege of being the recipient of (among others) the NWO Vici and ERC Advanced grants.