It is usual to consider that standards generate mixed feelings among
scientists. They are often seen as not really reflecting the state of the art
in a given domain and a hindrance to scientific creativity. Still, scientists
should theoretically be at the best place to bring their expertise into
standard developments, being even more neutral on issues that may typically be
related to competing industrial interests. Even if it could be thought of as
even more complex to think about developping standards in the humanities, we
will show how this can be made feasible through the experience gained both
within the Text Encoding Initiative consortium and the International
Organisation for Standardisation. By taking the specific case of lexical
resources, we will try to show how this brings about new ideas for designing
future research infrastructures in the human and social sciences
