The digital disruption of science
Résumé
Digitalization is changing the whole life cycle of research. It comes from a bottom-up movement: the very evolution of researchers’ practices. Digitalization is critical to improve the competitiveness of a research community. It has led government institutions to take over the subject and to frame innovative policies to encompass and foster this evolution. This chapter uses a qualitative approach with two case studies, the European and the French policy toward the digitalization of science. It demonstrates that the development of encompassing policies is relatively recent and comes with the formal adoption of the Open Access concept. It allows governments to deal with the previously existing dynamics about Open Access and Open Data and to progressively adopted new governing structures, in charge of the elaboration of new governmental strategies for the digitalization of science. Government thus plays a key role in this evolution, adding to a bottom-up evolution, top-down policies to ease and accompany the transition of research communities toward Open Science.