OpenEdition in context with Simon Dumas Primbault

This episode is part of a series which explores the history and the present of open science infrastructures for humanities and social sciences in France through the prism of one of its premier institutions: OpenEdition.

Piotr Wciślik and Magdalena Wnuk visited the OpenEdition headquarters in Marseille to talk to Simon Dumas Primbault, a theorist, historian and anthropologist of open science. Simon runs the OE Lab, OpenEdition’s unit whose mission is to study open science infrastructure from within.

Together we explore how the idea of research infrastructure emerged in history and how it was translated into the domain of humanities and social sciences.

That serves as a context for discussing the evolution of OpenEdition, which is a story of an uneasy process of fitting a social movement into an infrastructural framework.

As we learn from the last part of the episode, the challenge is to design a governance model that serves the needs of national research institutions in France, while preserving the ethos of a researcher-led social movement.

If you like this episode, you should also listen to our conversation with Pierre Mounier [https://www.spreaker.com/episode/serving-open-humanities-since-2001-a-conversation-with-pierre-mounier--69242474], a prominent figure of the French open science movement, and a reportage about OpenEdition we will release later in 2026.

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📌 This project is supported by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA) under the Strategic Partnership Programme.

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Episode transcript: https://sciros.hypotheses.org/2501