The project REERS intends to establish a European research network to study the apparition, not of the scientific discourse itself, but a metacritical discourse on science, emanating from those who develop and spread new knowledge, and the objective of which is to examine the inside of the foundations of their approach, to legitimize the value and usefulness of knowledge produced, and to define the special status of the people dedicated to it. This discourse does not still appear in the scientific literature itself, henceforth known by the experts, nor in the correspondence between scientists, of which important studies exist or are underway, but rather in a new category of texts, the appearance of which coincides with the creation of the first official institutions that aim at organizing and funding the work of scientists, academies, and which now address a new readership perceived as an instance of major recognition, the public space, at which is now aimed directly or indirectly, periodical publications from major European scientific institutions: the Journal des Savants, History and Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences, the Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society, or Acta Eruditorum of Leipzig, as well as several specialized journals. Such research seems only to be able to bear fruit in the large framework of a "Republic of Science", the nature of which deserves to be questioned since the development of the scientific discourse is inseparable from its broadcast, its reception and the mobility of those actors of the new knowledge inside the European area, in particular major European centers of scientific production. The upstream limit of the chronological framework is the publication of the first periodicals of scientific distribution (1665, Journal of Learned Men, Philosophical Transactions), and downstream, the creation of the Institute of France (1795), coinciding with a profound transformation of political and scientific institutions in Western Europe. This network aims at bringing together international experts (historians, historians of science, ideas, philosophy, literature, digital humanities specialists) working on the scientific metadiscourse, interested in the discussions about the validity and the utility of science, on the "researcher" status, the relationship between individuals and institutions and the political institutions that finance them. Ultimately, this work should allow to understand more clearly the appearance, the evolution and the consolidation of still operational concepts, particularly those of "scientific policy", of "expertise", or strategies of dissemination of scientific knowledge in the public sphere. The proposed corpus, large and heterogeneous, is presently available in digitized versions, in image mode, but remains hardly usable by means of IT query tools. Its use by traditional methods, in SHS, would require a considerable human investment, a systematic perusual of several hundred volumes of diverse nature (text, images, graphics, mathematical formulas), of complex nature. We therefore suggest to work on the development of a collaborative digital platform with scan with optical character recognition, of correction, of enrichment and scientific annotation and interpretation of the texts, on the model of a social network, offering at the same time to the scientific community free access to a reliable digital corpus, endowed with state-of-the-art query tools, and which can be of interest the researchers from a multidisciplinary perspective: history, history of science and ideas, philosophy, letters as well as mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, botany, anatomy, etc.