26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

Digital age is on its way to upheaval the science system. Deep transformations are pushing toward the openness of the production and the dissemination of scientific knowledge. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the transformations related to the multisided digital platforms. They have emerged as a driver of digital transformations. Multisided platforms function as intermediary devices that enable and, in many cases, coordinate the interactions among all the open science stakeholders. Digital platforms are extensively being used in a large variety of crowd science projects. These new citizens science intermediaries meet the needs of scientists to communicate with the large public in ways that were not possible before (Franzoni & Sauermann, 2014). Our paper analyzes the Canadian citizen science practices. The data come from a large-scale observation of several crowd science platforms. We first map the typologies of crowdsourcing platforms. Then, we explore the scale and scope of transformations that platform-intermediated knowledge production models induce in the science ecosystem. The paper discusses the implication of these transformations on science policy.