“We publish validated scientific knowledge for all readers”
Lucas Giossi heads the PPUR Foundation. 2024 EPFL / Alain Herzog - CC BY-SA 4.0
Lucas Giossi heads the PPUR Foundation – the scientific publishing house and university press for French-speaking Switzerland. PPUR, which is based at EPFL, has been increasingly successful on Giossi’s watch and now publishes a number of imprints.
PPUR is no lightweight in the local publishing market. The firm sells 70,000 books a year, has 1,200 titles in its catalogue and releases over 60 new books annually. “Our five imprints have become so popular thanks to the hard work of our 14 specialized employees,” says Giossi. “We’re one of the biggest publishing houses in our region in terms of our workforce.”
While Giossi spends much of his time crunching numbers, he also has a hand in PPUR’s operations through his role as an editorial supervisor. “I’m actually an editor at heart: I love digging into manuscripts,” he says. “Every year I try to work on six to ten projects from start to finish – when our design team takes over for layout and production.”
Driving a shift towards the humanities and social sciences
Before being selected to run PPUR in 2017, Giossi already had experience in the publishing industry. He founded a boutique publishing house at the University of Fribourg in 2014 along with colleagues in the French department, and led it until 2017. The University of Fribourg is also where he studied literature, linguistics, art history and psychology. “I specialized in epistemology, and one particular area of interest was the rhetoric of scientific discourse,” he says.
Drawing on his love of literature and solid background in the humanities and social sciences, Giossi helped drive change at PPUR by expanding its scope. The PPUR Foundation was set up by EPFL professor Jacques Neirynck in 1980 with an initial focus on the natural and formal sciences. But today, books in those disciplines are published by just one of PPUR’s brands: EPFL Press. Also, most of PPUR’s publications were initially technical in nature and intended for students and professionals. Yet over the past 20 years, the firm has branched into new types of books – still written by experts – to reach a wider audience.
Our books support the democratic process, promoting tolerance and inclusion and working toward the advancement of society as a whole.
“A good example of this is our Le Savoir Suisse imprint, introduced in 2002, which produces encyclopedia-style paperbacks,” says Giossi. “Then we launched Quanto in 2018 with the goal of making science accessible to the general public through tangible narratives. Quanto was so successful that we launched Editions 41 in 2022 to publish illustrated books and bring science to readers of all ages. Our most recent imprint is Épistémé, introduced in 2023 – it’s basically the equivalent of EPFL Press but for the humanities and social sciences. Épistémé issues both open access publications and printed works, and it gives researchers at universities in our region a new vehicle for publishing their discoveries.”
Through its various types and formats of publications, PPUR is working to disseminate validated scientific knowledge. “That’s what we aim to do on a daily basis, with quality as the top priority,” says Giossi. “By spreading knowledge, our books support the democratic process, promoting tolerance and inclusion and working toward the advancement of society as a whole.”
The PPUR Foundation was set up by an EPFL professor and is based on our Lausanne campus. It’s a non-profit organization financed by the proceeds of its sales and not by public funds.
The Foundation has an organizational link to EPFL, mainly because the School’s president appoints the Foundation’s board members. “In the past, board members were mainly EPFL professors,” says Giossi. “But that’s changed in line with the evolution in the kinds of books we publish. Now our board also includes media, finance and humanities professionals as well as students.”
Some of PPUR’s books are published abroad, which raises EPFL’s profile. “10% of our books are written in English,” says Giossi. “With our high-quality publications, we’re doing our part to bolster the School’s reputation.”
PPUR also plays an important role within the School, contributing to EPFL’s core mission of education by publishing some textbooks that are still used in the classroom.