Governing Digital Knowledge Infrastructures (2021-ongoing)

It is common to consider that the massive deployment of networked digital technologies from the end of the 1990s onwards in most developed countries, and then throughout the world, has led to an upheaval in the “knowledge order,” i.e., in concrete terms, in the way knowledge is produced, shared, disseminated, mobilised, and hierarchised in the various circumstances of social life. The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which in a few years has marginalised the monuments of reference literature such as the encyclopaedias Universalis and Britannica, is an emblematic example. The development of the open access movement for research publications, with its share of open archives, electronic journals, and other platforms, would not have been possible or even imaginable without a rapid shift in the scientific publishing sector towards making research results available online in digital format.

Researchers and practitioners are both engaged in an effort to better understand those complex objects that are the knowledge infrastructures. Interestingly, if both produce discourse and publications, they rarely collaborate and interact in this effort. This situation is probably not specific to knowledge infrastructures. However, it can be seen as a serious issue in the case of knowledge infrastructures precisely because of how much they influence and determine the conditions of knowledge production, assessment, and dissemination. Open Science is a typical case: while the movement expands rapidly in the scientific community, it places the infrastructure that supports it (e.g. platforms, data storage, publication infrastructures) in a central place to implement it. On one hand, as we said earlier, the practitioners produce an abundant discourse about Open Science and the need to sustain its infrastructure, on the other hand, very few researchers are actually studying open science infrastructure as such. There is therefore an obvious need to gather them together and create the conditions of fruitful exchanges on this topic.