Mounier, P. and Dumas Primbault, S. (2023) Sustaining Knowledge and Governing its Infrastructure in the Digital Age: An Integrated View. Preprint. HAL Open Science.

Sustaining Knowledge and Governing its Infrastructure in the Digital Age reconceptualises knowledge production by showing that knowledge no longer exists apart from the infrastructures through which it is produced, circulated, legitimised and preserved. Mounier and Dumas Primbault argue that digital research environments—platforms, repositories, metadata systems, protocols, identifiers and computational networks—operate not as passive technical supports but as constitutive epistemic conditions shaping what knowledge can become. Drawing on infrastructure studies, STS and ecological theories of information, the text defines knowledge infrastructures as sociotechnical assemblages composed of institutions, standards, software, hardware, practices and governance arrangements. Its most important contribution lies in demonstrating that infrastructures are politically performative: they embed values, hierarchies, forms of access and regimes of legitimacy. The authors trace infrastructure from nineteenth-century engineering and Cold War coordination to contemporary Open Science, revealing how material systems gradually became relational architectures for cooperation, interoperability and cognitive production. Particularly significant is their ecological approach, which treats infrastructures as dynamic processes sustained through maintenance, repair, resilience, diversity and anti-extractivist governance. Ultimately, the text argues that sustaining knowledge in the digital age requires not only technological innovation, but the ethical reinvention of the infrastructures that organise collective intelligence.