Center for Knowledge Infrastructures

Conference on the National Open Science Plan for France: From Strategy to Action

Paris, 4 December 2018

As France launches a national plan for open science that spans open access publishing, open access to data, and integration with international partnerships on scholarly sustainability, the country is taking a leap forward in developing new knowledge infrastructures – robust networks of people, artifacts, and institutions for producing, exchanging, and sustaining knowledge. Research data have become scholarly objects in their own right, to be released, shared, and reused. Publications and datasets are distinct genres that serve scholarship in complementary ways. Data sharing is a complex and labor-intensive process, and data reuse is even more so. Whereas data sharing policies presume that research data are useful to others and that others will reuse those data, neither outcome is assured. Concerns for data sharing and open access raise questions about what data to keep, what to share, when, how, and with whom. Thus, an infrastructural strategy for open science provides opportunities for action on stewardship and sustainability of scholarship. This talk is based on the speaker’s book, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (MIT Press, 2015) and subsequent research on knowledge infrastructures in science.