States of Secrecy: An Introduction

International audienceSecrecy became a major research topic in the history of science only in the last twenty-five years. Historians have come to realize how suffused scientific practice is with issues of secrecy. Yet they too often consider secrecy simply as a manner of protecting intellectual property to gain economic or military advantage over competitors. With this special issue, we want to give a state of research on scientific secrecy, but we also want also to hint at the richness of historiographical work still to be done when the focus is shifted from secrets to secrecy as a dynamic social relation