The Munin Conference addresses a wide range of topics within scholarly communication, with a strong focus on open science.

The conference has a history going back to 2006. In 2006, the University of Tromsø got its institutional repository for publications, which was called Munin. In connection with the launch of the repository, a seminar was organized at the end of November 2006, 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.

As described in this short history of the Munin conference, Munin was held in Norwegian in its initial years, 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. 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, 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.