International audienceDrawing on an ethnographic study of the installation and maintenance of Paris subway wayfinding system, this article attempts to discuss and specify previous claims that highlight stability and immutability as crucial aspects of material ordering processes. Though in designers' productions (such as guidelines or graphic manuals), subway signs have been standardized and their consistency has been invested in to stabilize riders' environment, they appear as fragile and transforming entities in the hands of maintenance workers. These two situated accounts are neither opposite nor paradoxical: they enact different versions of subway signs, the stabilization of which goes through the acknowledgment of their vulnerability. Practices that deal with material fragility are at the center of what we propose, following Annemarie Mol and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, to term a care of things. Foregrounding such a care of things is a way to surface a largely overlooked dimension of material ordering and to renew how maintainability issues are generally tackled. Keyword

International audienceBorn in the seventeenth century, journal peer review is an extremely diverse technology, constantly torn between two often incompatible goals: the validation of manuscripts conceived as a collective industrial-like reproducible process performed to assert scientific statements, and the dissemination of articles considered as a means to spur scientific discussion, raising controversies and civically challenging a state of knowledge. Such a situation is particularly conducive to clarifying the processes of valuation and evaluation in journal peer review. In this article, such processes are considered as specific tests in order to emphasize the uncertain properties of pre-tests manuscripts. On the one hand, evaluation tests are examined at the core of the validation of manuscripts, such as defining the coordination of judging instances (editor-in-chief, editorial committee, outside reviewers) or controlling the modalities of inter-knowledge between reviewers and authors. They are also studied regarding the dissemination of articles, notably through the contemporary conception of a continuing evaluation test termed " post publication peer review ". On the other hand, valuation tests are both part of the validation of manuscripts, such as the weighting of different judgments of the same manuscript and the tensions that these hierarchies cause, and of the dissemination of articles, such as attention metrics recording the uses of articles. The conclusion sketches out how the articulation of these different tests has recently empowered readers as a new key judging instance for dissemination and for validation, potentially transforming the definition of peers, and thus the whole process of journal peer review

Contributorship statements were introduced by scholarly journals in the late 1990s to provide more details on the specific contributions made by authors to research papers. After more than a decade of idiosyncratic taxonomies by journals, a partnership between medical journals and standards organizations has led to the establishment, in 2015, of the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), which provides a standardized set of 14 research contributions. Using the data from Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals over the 2017–2018 period ( N = 30,054 papers), this paper analyzes how research contributions are divided across research teams, focusing on the association between division of labor and number of authors, and authors’ position and specific contributions. It also assesses whether some contributions are more likely to be performed in conjunction with others and examines how the new taxonomy provides greater insight into the gendered nature of labor division. The paper concludes with a discussion of results with respect to current issues in research evaluation, science policy, and responsible research practices.

U rb an inscriptions are perform ative devices that play a crucial part in urban assemblages. They m ark sites, give places a name, designate directions. This paper questions such perform ativity by investigating the design and maintenance of subway signs in Paris. Studying backstage activities rather than user tactics, it shows that the semiotic production of space is mainly played out in standardization processes that are both oriented towards signs imm utability and fueled by a daily consideration for their vulnerability. Such a posture allows us to take full account of the ontological variations of signs (which can be, for example, stable or unstable, consistent or fragile, im mutable or mutable). M aintenance work, through which the agency o f urban inscriptions is partially shaped, ensures the articulation o f such a multiplicity.

International audienceIn a growing number of countries, governments and public agencies seek to systematically assess the scientific outputs of their universities and research institutions. Bibliometrics indicators and peer review are regularly used for this purpose, and their advantages and biases are discussed in a wide range of literature. This article examines how three different national organisations (AERES, ERA, ERIH) produce journal ratings as an alternative assessment tool, which is particularly targeted for social sciences and humanities. After setting out the organisational context in which these journal ratings emerged, the analysis highlights the main steps of their production, the criticism they received after publication, especially from journals, and the changes made during the ensuing revision process. The particular tensions of a tool designed as both a political instrument and a scientific apparatus are also discussed

Studies of scientific authorship have been developing for forty years. This phenomenon is becoming increasingly well documented. However, most of these studies deal with fields considered in only one national context. This article tries to understand the specific modalities of sociological authorship within two national contexts: the United States and France. The analysis yields an understanding of the logic intimately linking texts and contexts, throwing light not only on the way research and authorship practices are partly shaped by their particular institutional and historical contexts but also on the interactions between cognitive content and patterns of publication.

Key activities in biomedicine and related research rely on collections of biological samples and related files. Access to such resources in industry and in academic contexts has become strategic and represents a central issue in the general framework of rising patenting practices and in debates about the knowledge economy. It raises important issues concerning the organisation of scientific and medical work, the outline of data-sharing guidelines, and science policy's contribution to the elaboration of an adapted framework. This paper presents an ethnographic study of three French human biobanks. Building on field work (participant observation and in-depth interviews), the study focuses on data access in the concrete practices in biobanks. The paper develops a perspective based on an analysis of different exchange regimes. We argue that access practices are submitted to the different regimes that can coexist and be articulated within the daily activities of each biobank. We also discuss how this perspective can further our understanding of biomedical research, and how it might inform data access policy.

Tandis que la circulation transparente de l’information est devenue un mot d’ordre des flux de données, ce texte souligne le rôle crucial du travail effectué en coulisses des réseaux de télécommunication, aussi bien en science, en droit, dans l’administration, les industries culturelles ou les innovations de service. Témoignant de la contribution des infrastructure studies à une anthropologie des connaissances, il invite à élargir la gamme des situations habituellement étudiées en soulignant trois principaux aspects : la multiplicité des formes d’invisibilité du travail, les engagements et jugements au cœur de la production des écrits, et l’hétérogènéïté des matériaux qui composent les informations produites au jour le jour au sein des infrastructures scripturales.