Sharing Knowledge: from Openness to Awareness

In Europe, openness and international collaboration are recognised as fundamental to excellence in research and innovation. Starting from this assumption, the European Union has developed since the Lisbon Council policy frameworks to support its ambition to become the most competitive knowledge-based economy. Digital and data markets, open data, and open science policies - among others - have been launched. The Lisbon Council could be considered a turning point. In Europe, it is the beginning of a new political narrative, concerning the value of knowledge. Sharing knowledge and data would accelerate the production of science to meet challenges, accelerate the development of new products, support democracies through informed citizens, and support informed decisions by governments. The main objective induced was to maximize the value of the knowledge produced by the search. However, it is likely that after the fall of the Berlin wall we could have collectively forget that knowledge has always been a source of power. And consequently, having committed the political unthought of the place of research in the power strategies of states. Since the eighties, the expression "research and innovation" implicitly induces a continuum between research and innovation. But while the ways in which researchers interact are sharing and open collaboration, those of innovators is competition and protection. Thinking about the link between research and innovation means thinking about the tension between collaboration and protection, to sum up: research “to be as open as possible and as closed as necessary” or more recently “open as possible, secure as necessary.” We must acknowledge that the geography of the global knowledge economy has undergone, and is still undergoing, significant changes. And Research, considered as a privilege place of knowledge production, is deeply impacted by those changes. And research, and consequently knowledge entered in a competitive world. To support the development of their research, countries strengthen their soft power through a various range to attract international talents. Universities and other higher education stakeholders developed internationalisation strategies consisting in cross mobility programs, joint degree, and research cooperations. Cooperation assumes of mutual benefits for partners. Opportunity to collaborate is often the main perspective without considering through a structured approach the inherent risks, or negative externalities, of the collaboration. But since 2019, the rapid evolution of the geopolitical landscape raises up the awareness that research is at risk. Research, as a starting point to innovation, and consequently economic development, is increasingly concerned by the political ambitions of the different stakeholders. Those stakeholders will use all the range of tactics from open cooperation to interferences to capture the value produced. The paper proposes to discuss from an historical perspective the evolutions of research and data policies developed in France and European Union, from a strong belief of the value of openness to awareness to secure the production of value based on research. It also proposes to examine the impacts of those evolutions on research practises and cooperation.