To whom it may concern:

The writer, Sajad Sepehri, is an Educational Development & Innovation Strategist at ISSH and a fellow researcher at the VU Amsterdam. An interdisciplinary researcher, he works on system design, EdTech, AI in education and research, knowledge management, and publication infrastructures.

He was awarded a fellowship at the Istituto per il Lessico Intellettuale Europeo e Storia delle Idee in Rome, for expanding his work on polymathic-generalistic epistemology as a methodological approach for developing Language-Agnostic Knowledge—an attempt to respond to the necessity of an epistemic shift in Open Science and beyond.

First Breath in Rome

The moment I stepped out of the terminal in Rome, the warm air hit me. It was not a comforting warmth; it was a trigger, a sensory key unlocking a traumatic memory of the homeland I have been away from for a lifetime. My host, Giuseppe, led us to the so-called limousine parking area—a name that lingered from another era, now populated by ordinary sedans. Our driver, a man with a mature face and the recklessness of a teenager, sped toward the city at 120 kilometers an hour, tailgating cars until they surrendered. Through the window I saw ancient walls scarred with graffiti, swarms of young people drawn to the night like moths to a flame.

This fellowship was meant to be an intellectual pilgrimage. Yet in those first hours I was consumed by homesickness. A part of me remained in Tirana, a part with my family in the Netherlands, and another part—aching and persistent—in Shiraz, the city I have been away from for many years. The next morning, I made a video call to my wife, Nina, to share our ritual of morning coffee. We talked about our son, who hates school just as his father once did. Later, I went searching for a supermarket to buy eggs, oil, and bread—a small act of replication, a way of anchoring myself in a world that felt adrift.

Rome introduced itself as a city with a “slow memory.” Unlike the crisp orderliness of the Netherlands, life here feels layered and deep. History is not locked away in museums; it is sedimented into the very stones, memories recorded slowly on the body of the city itself. This first week was less about libraries or archives than about encounters—conversations that shifted my project more than any manuscript could.

A Confession

I am not a place person, I am a people person. Monuments, ruins, or landscapes do not move me if I stand before them alone. What animates a city for me are its conversations, its dinners, its encounters. That is why in my first week I was eager to meet, to talk, to write—not to wander through the sights. Rome, for me, was never going to be the Colosseum; it was always going to be Cristina, Lorenzo, Federico, Lisa, Ramazan, Ali, Francesca, Lottie, Pamela, Fillipo, and the other faces with whom we had non-verbal communications.

One can distinguish between those who form attachments to landscapes and those whose sense of belonging is mediated through relationships. My orientation is the latter. Perhaps it is because of my status as an atopos1—placeless, alien, exiled. Belonging, for me, has always been compensated through people, never through soil or stone. That is why I feel Albanian, I feel Iranian, I feel Kurd, I feel even Italian—and no one has the authority to police that feeling.

From the political view Agamben in his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare life explained it. Exile and statelessness cast me as homo sacer, life reduced to its minimum, unprotected, unrecognized. But that very exclusion created the strangeness of atopos: the vantage point of never fitting, of seeing connections others overlook. This is what I call “Life On the Edges”. What is political deprivation in one register, becomes philosophical fecundity2 in another. My belonging has never been secured by soil or passport; it has been remade through people, through encounters, through relation itself.

This does not mean I am numb to places. I am filled with amazement, awe, thought, and joy by history, by heritage, by stones, by bridges. But for me these feelings are never solitary—they are always tethered to relation. To stand before a monument with Nina is not the same as standing there alone; her presence transforms stone into memory. To sit at a historical piazza with a cup of the best coffee of my life3 is not just scenery, it is a relationship—with the act of writing, with thought itself. When I write, I am in my own company. Again, there is a relationship. As Edward Casey writes in Getting Back into Place, place is experienced through memory, body, and relation. I could not agree more. Rome is doing exactly that to me—through the incredible people I meet, the foods I eat, and the words I read or write while looking at its historical stones. I am becoming Italian4.

1. I Found a Treasure, and It Was a Person

My first full day was spent at the Istituto per il Lessico Intellettuale Europeo e Storia delle Idee (ILIESI). There I met Cristina Marras, the institute’s Research Director. From the first words we exchanged, I felt an exhilarating sense of recognition. We stood on different banks of the same river, yet somehow spoke the same language.

For years, I had been developing ideas about knowledge systems, intuitive and feasible, but lacking formal grounding. Cristina introduced me to her work on pragmatic modeling and the constitutive role of metaphors in organizing knowledge. I’ll write a review of her book soon. It was as if she had handed me the precise epistemological framework I had been tentatively reaching toward in the shadow.

I left the institute convinced I had found a treasure—a treasure named Cristina Marras.

That evening, in autumn rain, we picked up an authentic Italian pizza. It was so profoundly different from every counterfeit “Italian pizza” I had ever tasted that it felt like another philosophical revelation: even pizza can reveal the gap between imitation and reality. Coffee has a similar situation. However, I must admit that I am incredibly proud of the Albanian coffee.

2. A Language’s “Flaw” Can Be Its Greatest Strength

On my second day I met Lorenzo Giovannetti, a philosopher whose work on Plato has earned recognition from the International Plato Society. He teaches at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” and his path winds through Rome, Oxford, Tübingen, Sussex, and beyond—a life steeped in Greek thought and its afterlives.

We spoke of the Persian pronoun او (oo). From a computational standpoint, it is “flawed”: it carries no gender and can mean either “he” or “she.” In Cristina’s perspective, it is inadequate, and this inadequacy presents an opportunity for meaning-making. Lorenzo and I agreed, what one framework sees as a bug, another recognizes as richness. Persian poetry thrives on this ambiguity, suspending gender and letting love exist beyond categories. For centuries, this single pronoun has kept alive questions no grammar book could resolve.

This insight reinforced what I have argued: a multilingual knowledge system cannot be reductionist. It must embrace ambiguities, not attempt to sterilize them. It seems that the current Euro-centric notion of multilingualism is disastrously reductionistic.

3. The Most Creative Space Is the One Between Categories

Lorenzo brought another connection. He reminded me of the Greek word atopos—literally “without a place.” He said that Socrates was called atopos, which means absurd, uncategorizable, and placeless.

Pierre Hadot used the concept to highlight Socrates’ unique character as a philosopher who couldn’t quite be “placed” within the social or intellectual conventions of his time

My legal status is “alien.” I was stateless, suspended between nations. My academic work resists belonging to any single discipline. My life unfolds between languages. For many this in-betweenness feels like exile. But I recognize it as a vantage point.

I call it a Polymathic-Generalistic epistemology: the ability to see connections invisible to those rooted firmly inside categories. True creation happens not in the center but on the edges, in those porous spaces where worlds brush against each other. Therefore, the PGE is a methodological approach.

4. Words Are Travelers, and They Collect Souvenirs

One evening, over dinner with Cristina Marras, Ramazan Turgut, Federico Silvestri, and Lisa Reggiani, we ate pizza and supplì and joked about words. (It is impossible to be with Cristina and not talk about words.)

Federico, a brilliant researcher of contemporary philosophy, spoke of Italy, its north-south divides, its economic struggles, its literature. Lisa, a technologist at ILIESI, thoughtful, calm, mostly listening and humble. It was one of those dinners where conversation moves lightly from etymology to politics to jokes, the kind of evening that convinces you philosophy is not confined to conferences and lexicon archives, but thrives in shared meals.

I brought up the word mohabbat (or muhabbet). Its root is Arabic ح ب ب, meaning love. From there it traveled:

• Persian: an act done out of loving and caring.

• Turkish/Ottoman: conversation, dialogue (a friendly one maybe)

How can one word hold absolute love, a loving act, and a chat over tea? Because words are travelers. They collect souvenirs from each culture they pass through, carrying their ghosts into the present.

This is why translation alone is never enough. A robust knowledge system must honor the sediment of meanings without flattening them. What I have been calling a “semi-structured” approach is, I now realize, aligned with Cristina’s middle-out approach—a way to preserve nuance without dissolving into chaos.

In the Language Agnostic Knowledge framework, I aim to expand and conceptualize knowledge through co-creation. Translation, contrary to its current perception as a secondary or derivative act, is not considered such in this framework. It is a form of pragmatic modelling in which a Piece is re-inscribed in a new linguistic and cultural context. This act has a dual role: one part of the original knowledge is necessarily lost, yet at the same time new context and new knowledge are created. Translation is thus an extension of the original, not its dilution. Its attachment and closeness to the original are essential, for it depends upon it; yet it simultaneously expands the epistemic field by producing new meaning. LAK therefore rejects the treatment of translation as second-hand work and affirms its value as co-equal knowledge production.

5. To Build the Future of Knowledge, We Must Talk to the Ancient Greeks

My conversation with Lorenzo circled back to philosophy’s foundations. He described an ancient model of language:

• Plato’s Window in his theory of Forms: the mind, through dialectic, can apprehend reality itself. Language participates, but imperfectly—it points toward truth but can also mislead.

I, on the other hand, was referring to the mirror metaphor, which Leibniz (a Post-Cartesian philosopher) frequently used in his work, as Cristina rightly identifies as among the most recurring metaphors.

• Mirror: Leibniz often speaks of language as a system of signs or symbols (characteristica universalis). Words reflect concepts, which in turn reflect reality. But the reflection is indirect—signs represent ideas, which represent things.

Which metaphor we choose is not trivial. It sets the epistemic architecture for what knowledge can be.

The Labyrinth Ahead

By the end of the week, I felt I was not standing at the start of a straight road but in the mouth of a labyrinth. Every turn promised discovery, every corner a dead end or a new connection.

In a workshop earlier in the week, I had already met Francesca, Lottie, Pamela, and others, each encounter adding another thread to the web. And today, Fillipo Mosca, a philosopher, presented a chatbot project on Wittgenstein’s Oracle. I guess that this project is related to a previous project here. He was so generous to spend time explaining his work, which made me rethink the scale of what is possible with AI. I realized that this possibility is very much dependent on how well a CS graduate can grasp philosophical and epistemic abstraction.

Yet one thought lingered:

universities, with their glacial pace, will never catch up with the storm of AI and the speed of corporate labs. Unless they begin working with small, emerging technology groups—those rare companies that still earn trust through creativity rather than marketing—academic R&D risks becoming an expensive exercise in futility.

The irony of Rome is that in a city of ruins, one feels the pulse of life more vividly than in the sterile offices of “innovation.”

Something important is unfolding here. Perhaps it is only the slow memory of the city teaching me to walk differently. Perhaps it is the conversations, the words, the shared meals. Or perhaps it is the recognition that knowledge itself is a labyrinth (or an ocean!)—and I am already inside.

What happens when the pressing questions of humanities in the digital and AI era collide with the slow memory of an ancient city?

Italians might say, “Don’t worry! Relax!”

Recently, I had the distinct privilege of participating in a workshop at the historic Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) in Rome. This was not a typical academic seminar. Its objective, guided by the thoughtful work of our hosts, was to practice the very principles of Open Science in the process of creating a book about it. The gathering was a living experiment in collaborative knowledge creation, aiming to embody its subject matter. The central figure of our discussion was Francesca Di Donato, a researcher at CNR-ILC, who presented a chapter from her work-in-progress on the visual metaphors that have shaped the Open Science movement. This article is a personal reflection on her incisive presentation and the rich, stimulating discussions that followed. The opportunity for my colleague, Ramazan, and me to join this brilliant group was made possible through a research fellowship and the generous support of Cristina Marras1, whose dedication to the project was tangible. As the workshop unfolded mainly in Italian, it added a rewarding layer of cross-cultural engagement to this intellectual experience. The purpose of this article is to trace the evolution of Open Science metaphors as charted by Di Donato and to offer a critical yet pragmatic extension of her final, powerful proposal: the metaphor of the forest.

2. The Metaphorical Ladder: Charting the Visual Language of Open Science

Context and Attribution

Understanding the visual metaphors used to describe Open Science is not merely an academic exercise; it is crucial for grasping the movement’s evolving values, priorities, and cultural assumptions. These images are not just decorative—they shape definitions and reveal the underlying research cultures that produce them. The following intellectual cartography, which traces a clear evolutionary path in the visual language of Open Science, is drawn directly from the meticulous research Francesca Di Donato presented for her forthcoming book. This section serves as a summary of her analysis.

2.2 The Umbrella and the Mushroom

As Di Donato explained, the journey begins with the ‘umbrella’ metaphor, famously introduced by Fecher & Friesike (2013). The umbrella is a man-made artifact, a tool created to serve a specific purpose: to collect and shelter a variety of related concepts under a single, simplifying term. It is an image of utility and consolidation. Yet, as Di Donato demonstrated through examples from communities like Public & Science Sweden, the EOSC-hub project, and Brazil’s FIOCRUZ, what lies under the umbrella varies significantly. Each interpretation reflects the priorities of its respective community, arranging practices like Open Access, Open Data, and Citizen Science in different configurations and hierarchies.

Di Donato then highlighted a significant conceptual shift with the introduction of the ‘mushroom’ metaphor by Eva Méndez. This marked a crucial move away from a man-made artifact toward a natural, living organism. The mushroom is not merely a container for visible practices. Its power lies in introducing the idea of a hidden, submerged system—a root network analogous to an iceberg’s submerged mass. Di Donato detailed its anatomy: the gills (lamelle) represent Citizen Science, and the stem (fusto) symbolizes standards and governance. Crucially, the roots represent the foundational elements of research integrity, infrastructure, and alternative evaluation systems, which are essential for nourishing the visible parts of the organism.

2.3 The Wheel and the Tree

The next step in this metaphorical evolution, Di Donato showed, is the ‘wheel’, developed by Kramer & Bosman (2017). Shifting back to a human invention, the wheel represents Open Science as an infinite, circular research workflow. It maps practices onto different phases of research—from discovery and analysis to publication and outreach—in a continuous loop. As one of humanity’s most important inventions, the wheel metaphor elevates Open Science from a mere collection of practices to a fundamental process, a new engine for knowledge production. Di Donato noted that the wheel also evokes the hermeneutic circle—the interpretive process where understanding a text, or in this case, a research field, requires a continuous movement between the whole and its constituent parts.

This idea of process is further systematized in the ‘taxonomy’ and ‘tree’ metaphors, exemplified by the FOSTER taxonomy. The tree organizes the components of Open Science into a hierarchical structure, bringing order and detail to the ecosystem. However, the tree is laden with deeper historical symbolism. Di Donato powerfully recounted how trees became emblems of resistance and revolution. In the American Revolution, the “Liberty Tree,” an elm in Boston, became a rallying point for resistance. During the French Revolution, a priest named Norbert Pressac replanted an oak as a patriotic symbol, an idea that spread rapidly. Quoting Stefano Mancuso, Di Donato explained the profound symbolism: “Dying or dead nature must be only the emblem of despotism. Conversely, living and productive nature... must be the image of liberty.” This association imbues the Open Science movement with a legacy of radical, systemic change.

2.4 The Graph

The final precursor to the forest is the ‘graph’ metaphor, notably used in a UNESCO (2020) document. A graph is a mathematical structure composed of vertices and arches, a model that immediately evokes the interconnected topologies of the internet and the World Wide Web. As presented by Di Donato, this metaphor powerfully emphasizes three core UNESCO objectives: making knowledge openly available, enhancing collaboration and information sharing, and opening the scientific process itself to actors beyond the traditional scientific community. The graph portrays Open Science not as a static collection or a linear process, but as a dynamic, decentralized network of relationships. This vision of a complex, living network serves as the perfect bridge to Di Donato’s own proposal: the forest.

3. The Forest of Open Science: A New Ecosystemic Vision

Context and Proposal

Francesca Di Donato’s proposed ‘forest’ metaphor is more than just the next step in this progression; it is a sophisticated synthesis that absorbs the strengths of its predecessors. It offers a richer, more dynamic, and more value-laden vision for Open Science, framing it as a living, collaborative, and intelligent ecosystem.

An Inclusive and Collaborative Ecosystem

In Di Donato’s interpretation, the forest seamlessly integrates the most potent elements of previous metaphors. It is a natural organism like the mushroom, its revolutionary roots recall the symbolism of the tree, and its vast, interconnected root system functions as a living graph. She attributes to this forest a series of profoundly positive qualities that align with the highest aspirations of the Open Science movement:

• Collaboration: The forest ecosystem is built on a model of mutual support, as theorized by Kropotkin (1902). Trees are not isolated competitors but members of a vast community connected by a subterranean network that exchanges nutrients, water, and information.

• Inclusivity and Biodiversity: The forest is a collective enterprise where diverse actors contribute to the health of the whole. In this ecosystem, even “dead trees”—completed projects or retired datasets—continue to provide nourishment and structure, fulfilling a vital function.

• Collective Intelligence: Drawing on contemporary plant science, Di Donato describes the forest as a “swarm of swarms.” Individual plants possess a distributed, modular intelligence, and the forest as a whole forms a collective intelligence far greater than the sum of its parts as Ramazan commented in the discussion.

• A Shift in Values: This ecological vision fundamentally changes how we assess value. Citing Mounier (2022), Di Donato argued that the forest metaphor encourages us to move beyond conventional metrics of efficiency and excellence and ask new, more profound questions about our work: “Is it sustainable? Is it inclusive? Is it creative? Is it alive?”

My Reflections

This compelling and beautiful portrayal of the Open Science forest sets a high ideal. However, it is precisely its power that necessitates a critical re-evaluation.

4. A Critical Re-reading: The Inherent Asymmetries of the Forest

Context and Critique

Any potent metaphor risks becoming a romanticized ideal if not grounded in the complexities of reality. During the workshop, I felt compelled to offer a critical perspective, arguing that the true strength of the forest metaphor lies not in its idealism but in its capacity to represent the very real tensions and inequalities that persist within our knowledge ecosystems. A factual examination of a forest reveals it to be a site of structural asymmetry, not purely egalitarian harmony.

Beyond Romanticism: Confronting the “Dark” Forest

To truly serve as a pragmatic tool (I’ve learned a lot during my skimming through the work of Cristina Marras on pragmatic modelling and middle-out approach and the constitutive nature of metaphor), the metaphor must encompass the “darker” aspects of the forest—the realities of competition, exclusion, and inequality. These natural processes offer powerful parallels to the systemic challenges facing the Open Science movement:

• Unequal Resource Distribution: In a real forest, tall canopy trees monopolize sunlight, often starving the understory plants below. Root systems compete fiercely for water and nutrients. This directly mirrors how privileged institutions and Anglophone-centric research dominate the global knowledge landscape, capturing the majority of visibility, funding, and resources.

• Absence of Equal Opportunity: A seed’s survival is heavily dependent on the chance of where it lands. A spot with fertile soil and adequate light allows it to thrive, while an equally viable seed may perish in deep shade. This reflects the systemic barriers and positional advantages in academia, where success is often contingent on pedigree and geography rather than merit alone.

• Exclusion and Competition: Some plant species engage in allelopathy, releasing chemicals to actively suppress the growth of competitors. This is a stark metaphor for the persistent competition for funding and recognition, the gatekeeping practices of established journals, and the institutional rivalries that can stifle collaboration.

• Efficiency Without Fairness: A forest is a remarkably resilient and efficient system, but its efficiency is achieved through brutal cycles of dominance, decay, and regrowth. It is a system of winners and losers. This parallels how the current scientific ecosystem can be highly efficient at producing a massive volume of outputs while failing to be fair or equitable in its methods of evaluation and reward.

Mapping the Gaps in Practice

This critical lens helps synthesize a core problem: the Open Science movement, in its current form, resolves access asymmetry far more effectively than it resolves evaluative asymmetry. We have made great strides in lowering the barriers to reading scientific literature, but the deep-seated asymmetries of recognition, reward, and linguistic privilege persist. The infrastructures, metrics, and incentive structures remain predominantly Anglophone and tilted toward quantitative measures that favor already-dominant institutions. The forest metaphor’s greatest value, therefore, is not in romanticizing openness but in its capacity to make these tensions visible, challenging the status quo and forcing us to confront the gaps between our principles and our practices.

5. Enriching the Metaphor: Towards a Pragmatic and Constitutive Image

Context and Synthesis

For a metaphor to be truly useful, it must move beyond mere description. It must be complex enough to represent reality and robust enough to guide action—to become a constitutive tool for building a better system. The collaborative discussions at the workshop became an exercise in enriching the forest metaphor, layering it with the nuance needed to make it both a map of the present and a guide for the future.

Insights from a Community of Practice

Our breakout groups—a mix of librarians, philosophers, and other researchers—began to annotate Di Donato’s image, adding elements to represent both principles and problems. Our group, among others, proposed several critical additions:

• A frame or boundary around the forest, representing the protecting principles, ethical guidelines, and shared values (like multilingualism and pluralism) that must define and defend the ecosystem.

• Facilitators and unifiers in the sky above—forces of connection and aggregation like bees, wind, and birds, and perhaps even AI represented as an airplane—that pollinate ideas and bridge communities as a sign of openness of the forest to naturalize and integrate artificial intelligences.

• A crack or canyon cleaving the ground, symbolizing the digital divides, resource gaps, and systemic fragmentations that prevent the root network from being truly universal.

In a particularly insightful contribution, my colleague Ramazan invoked the poet Nazim Hikmat2, suggesting that if the individual trees are researchers and institutions, then the “invisible labor” of maintenance, care, and community-building is the glue that binds them into a forest, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Cristina Marras elegantly reframed this concept as the unseen “photosynthesis”—the quiet, essential labor that converts light into energy and nourishes the entire system.

An Argument for Nuance

During our discussion, Francesca voiced a preference for keeping the core image simple. I respectfully disagree, arguing that a pragmatic and constitutive metaphor may require detail and nuance. The Mona Lisa, while a simple portrait of a person, contains infinite, vital details. Similarly, a complex image allows us to identify specific challenges and opportunities. By explicitly visualizing the frame that protects, the canyons that divide, and the pollinators that connect, the metaphor becomes a practical tool. It transforms from an image that simply describes an ideal into one that helps us constitute a more equitable practice by making its gaps, asymmetries, and essential components visible and actionable.

Every metaphor must function as an orienting device. It should momentarily capture the thinker, establish a frame, and provide the scaffolding through which knowledge can be organized. Cristina Marras and others name this the pragmatic operators: the capacity of a metaphor to guide the act of structuring thought. With the forest, one does not need to over-explain in order to achieve initial recognition. The concept is immediately available to human cognition; class and category emerge almost intuitively. What follows are the particularities, the differentiations, the multiple layers of meaning. My argument is that producing a spectrum of images—a simple outline, a moderately detailed sketch, and a fully articulated rendering—introduces variability and negotiability. It acknowledges the multiplicity of perspectives, even the darker, more pessimistic readings of the status quo. This adaptability transforms the forest into an inclusive framework, capable of serving not only as an emblem of idealized openness but also as a pragmatic diagnostic tool.

The framework then resists closure. It remains open, in the spirit of Open Science, to diverse pragmatic interpretations while preserving the integrity of the central metaphor: the forest as an ecosystem with distinctive properties. Within this orientation, detail is not a distraction but a means of enabling the metaphor to act as both descriptive and constitutive. Inspired by Marras’s reading of Leibniz, the forest may function as a mirror—reflecting configurations of knowledge—or as a maze—disclosing the complexities, barriers, and asymmetries embedded within it. This duality is precisely what makes the metaphor effective: it does not freeze meaning but sustains a dynamic play between recognition and exploration.

6. Conclusion: A Personal Reflection on Hope, Pessimism, and the Future

Recapitulation and Personal Duality

The central argument of this reflection is that the forest is a profound and powerful metaphor for Open Science, but only when we embrace its full, un-romanticized complexity. It must contain both the cooperative, life-giving ecosystem we aspire to and the “darker,” asymmetrical realities of competition and exclusion we currently inhabit. The experience of the workshop left me with a deep sense of this duality. On one hand, I was filled with admiration for the passionate, dedicated researchers I met. In an old building that reminded me of my old school, they pour their love into foundational fields like philosophy, linguistics, and epistemology. Between discussions, over the fast coffees that punctuated our breaks, I saw a community dedicated to work whose societal impact is not immediately marketable but is profoundly essential.

On the other hand, I carry a persistent pessimism about the broader injustices of the global knowledge economy, where vast sums are allocated to weapons while these same scholars struggle for funding, and where the academic reward system often feels disconnected from the pursuit of genuine understanding. This workshop crystallized that tension for me: the hope inspired by a small group of brilliant, caring individuals against the backdrop of a deeply flawed global system.

Gratitude and a Look Forward

I am immensely grateful to Francesca Di Donato for sharing her brilliant work and for her inspiring openness to dialogue and critique. My thanks also go to Cristina Marras, Ramazan, and all the participants whose insights enriched the day immeasurably. I eagerly await the publication of Francesca’s book and hope it finds the wide readership and spirited discussion it so clearly deserves.

Ultimately, this experience reinforced my belief that balancing pessimism with hope is not a contradiction but a necessity. Critical and collaborative reflections like the one we shared in Rome are essential for steering the Open Science movement away from romantic idealism and toward its substantive, transformative promise. Let us hope this vision for an open science, or دانش باز, continues to grow.

7. References

All references can be found in Francesca’s work:

Di Donato, Francesca. “Le immagini della scienza aperta”. Presented at the Che cos’è la scienza aperta? Le immagini della scienza aperta, CNR, Roma, September 19, 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17158926.

Introduction

For centuries, knowledge has been filtered, structured, and distributed through systems that privilege a single language, primarily English. This has created an invisible barrier between vast bodies of thought and the communities that produced them. The result is a double failure: societies cannot fully access locally relevant research, and the global scholarly community cannot benefit from the diversity of perspectives that already exist.

In the age of Artificial Intelligence and interconnected infrastructures, this imbalance is no longer a necessity—it is an error. The time has come for what I call Language Agnostic Knowledge (LAK): an epistemology, a framework, and a practical infrastructure for building a knowledge system that is not bound to a single language but instead operates across all of them.

The Problem We Face

Today’s education and scholarly communication systems are failing faster than ever. They are unable to adapt to the speed of technological change, the social need for inclusivity, and the growing recognition that language itself is a form of structural inequality. Research shows that linguistic bias in scholarly communication leads to invisibility, lower citations, and reduced career opportunities for non-English speakers . At the societal level, it prevents communities from benefiting from research produced in their own contexts.

Global infrastructures like Crossref, ORCID, DataCite, and OpenAIRE are aware of these issues, but the underlying problem persists: metadata schemas and evaluation systems are still overwhelmingly designed with English as the default. Initiatives like the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism and the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science have pushed the conversation forward, yet implementation lags.

This is not simply a matter of accessibility. It is a matter of equity, epistemic justice, and the survival of cultural and intellectual diversity.

The Origin of LAK

The roots of LAK go back much further than its first public articulation. Since childhood, I have been obsessed with the problem of how knowledge is fragmented, distorted, or lost across languages. By 2020, I had begun formulating this obsession into a structured project, and from 2023—when the AI boom accelerated—it became my professional focus. I have to thank Nina (my wife) for being the first person supporting my crazy ideas.

What emerged was a newly formulated knowledge ontology designed to support a robust, language-agnostic system of knowledge. This ontology is not an abstract schema but a living foundation for scalable, AI-native infrastructures.

I first shared LAK in an articulated form with a group of highly educated and expert people in various fields including AI and Data engineering, scholarly writing, design, system thinking, teaching, knowledge management, etc., then at the Crossref Sprint in Madrid (2025), and continued refining it in Oslo (2025) at the PKP Sprint . What a great opportunity to meet so many great people. There, multilingualism emerged as the unavoidable center of every discussion, whether the focus was on workflows, publishing tools, or culture. It was clear: the current infrastructure cannot deliver the inclusivity we need without a fundamental rethinking. The title of the session I was thankful to lead was “How to get rid of MS Word”. I felt it encapsulates many things and functions as a meme. It did, and it worked.

Ramazan Turgut, a fellow polyglot whom I first met in Madrid, immediately recognized the significance of LAK. Together, we embarked on an advocacy journey initiated by him. Over time, we established connections between LAK and PKP’s infrastructure, particularly OJS, OMP, and OPS. I believe these are the most pragmatic mediators between today’s scholarly publishing and tomorrow’s open, language-inclusive knowledge systems. Ramazan was highly skilled and experienced, and I gained numerous new insights. I want to acknowledge that he not only enriched LAK with his inputs and expertise but also encouraged me, recognized my value, and motivated me to pursue this more in the academic realm. I hope more individuals like him will join and support the LAK initiative. LAK will serve as a blueprint, inspiring the creation of numerous applications like LeraLink..

ISSH: The Home and Testbed

None of this work would have been possible without the Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities - (AKA Iran Academia) in The Hague. From the very beginning, ISSH has been the home where these ideas could be tested, refined, and given real-world shape. ISSH is the first fully online, tuition-free, multilingual graduate school, and it has provided not only the institutional foundation but also the trust and support to pursue LAK.

I owe particular gratitude to Ali Reza Kazemi, the founder and executive director of ISSH Foundation, who placed his faith in this project and in me and encouraged me and supported me to carry it forward. ISSH is more than a host and partner—it is the environment where multilingual knowledge infrastructures are not only theorized but lived, every day, in practice.

My current role as an educational development and innovation strategist at ISSH is to revamp our entire publication infrastructure, utilizing PKP products such as OJS, OMP, and OPS. I envision this transformation as a pioneering example of multilingual publication within our existing infrastructure. This initiative marks a significant step towards the future of knowledge, encompassing not only scholarly production but also other forms of knowledge supported by ISSH.

In a recent and exciting development, we have also begun laying the technical foundations of LeraLink in collaboration with Mehdi Mohseni (in his free time), a highly talented and experienced system architect and senior developer, and more importantly, a compatriot and friend with whom I experienced the hardship far beyond building LeraLink. His expertise is helping transform the LAK ontology into a functioning platform. We will share more about this progress once the time is right, but the groundwork is being set.

The Foundations of LAK

LAK rests on several principles:

1. Language Agnosticism: Knowledge should not be trapped within the boundaries of a single language. Metadata, identifiers, and systems must be designed to operate independently of linguistic constraints.

2. Co-Creation of Knowledge: Knowledge is not owned by publishers, platforms, or elites. It emerges through collaborative production, translation, annotation, design, proofreading, editing, supervising, reviewing and exchange.

3. Integration with Persistent Identifiers (PIDs): ORCID for people, ROR for organizations, DOIs for works. These identifiers must support multilingual fields, cross-lingual discoverability, and transparent provenance.

4. AI-Native and Ontology-Driven: LAK leverages AI not as a patchwork translation tool but as a native element of the system—extracting, enriching, and aligning knowledge across languages through ontologies and semantic frameworks.

5. Social Learning and Cognitive Efficiency: Building on cognitive load theory, LAK aims for systems that are not only rigorous but also usable, exchangeable, and trackable. Learning should be as engaging as Netflix, as social as TikTok, and as rigorous and contextually rich as the best academic curricula..

From Concept to Application: LeraLink

LAK is not only a theoretical vision—it is embodied in LeraLink, the unified knowledge system I have been developing together with many others. I would like to thank Sadik and Bujar Bakiu, Polina Cico, Armando Demaj, Ziad Moubayed, Mike, and Marjan de Jong, along with many others whose names cannot all be listed here, for their invaluable support at different phases of this journey.

LeraLink is designed with an atomic architecture, or what I prefer to call a fractal architecture. The smallest unit, known as a Piece, can represent any knowledge element anywhere multiple times while maintaining its single point of truth.

In short, LeraLink is a working example of how LAK principles can be applied in practice.

More on this later.

Rising Beyond the Legacy

LAK is not a solitary work. It builds upon the pioneering work of infrastructures and initiatives that have shaped today’s knowledge ecosystem:

• ORCID and ROR for disambiguating scholars and institutions.

• Crossref and DataCite for persistent identifiers and metadata networks.

• PKP for democratizing open publishing infrastructures.

• OpenAIRE and EOSC for aggregating and interlinking research outputs.

I am grateful to be a member of the Crossref Metadata Advisory Group, and to have witnessed first-hand the potential and limitations of these systems. LAK is not a replacement—it seeks to align them toward a common horizon.

Fellowship in Italy: Extending the Journey

As part of this ongoing journey, (of course, with Ramazan’s usual encouragement) I was recently awarded a fellowship with the H2IOSC–OPERAS Transnational Access Programme at CNR ILIESI (National Research Council of Italy) in Rome. This opportunity allows me to deepen the work on Language Agnostic Knowledge (LAK) in collaboration with Ramazan Turgut and to situate our ideas within one of Europe’s most respected centers for ontology and multilingual scholarship. Our aim is to work closely with the institution’s experts and researchers, to refine LAK’s ontology, to test its edge cases, and hopefully, to co-create conceptual models that integrate seamlessly into FAIR and multilingual infrastructures. Beyond the technical dimension, I hope this fellowship becomes a place where I can meet new colleagues willing to join us in building the foundations of equitable, language-agnostic knowledge systems.

Allow me to clarify: While terminology may vary across different fields—such as decolonizing knowledge, socio-linguistic bridging, or global North-South collaboration—the underlying objective remains consistent. The focus is on enhancing the availability, accessibility, and diversity of knowledge, fostering meaningful exchanges that transcend socio-linguistic barriers.

Beyond One Essay

This is not a manifesto, but a beginning. The work of LAK is ambitious: rethinking the architecture of knowledge in ways that dismantle linguistic monopolies, redesign ownership, contribution, and incentive models, and integrate AI responsibly into the heart of education and research.

It is also deeply personal. My journey as a life-long learner, project manager, researcher, and educator of methodology and knowledge management has always been shadowed by the failures of existing systems. ISSH was a home for experimentation, while LeraLink is becoming the embodiment of these principles. At VU Amsterdam too, I am grounding this vision in academic research while preparing my trajectory for a PhD-level inquiry.

Ontology-Driven Multilingual Publishing Pipelines for Epistemic Justice in AI-Era Knowledge Infrastructures

AI, Multilingualism, and Knowledge Infrastructures: Toward Epistemically Just and Equitable Learning Ecosystems.

I investigate how AI-native, multilingual publishing pipelines in LeraLink can operationalize epistemic justice by enforcing language-aware metadata, PID integrity, and linked-data interoperability at design time. The work formalizes a five-tier knowledge ontology—optimized for atomic knowledge units and cross-language versioning—mapped to established bibliographic/LD models (conceptually consonant with FRBR/FRBR-LRM and BIBFRAME) while remaining implementation-specific to our stack (tiers: Piece, Source, Volume, Series, Collections). Multilingual rigor follows COAR’s repository recommendations (ISO-639 language coding, UTF-8, multilingual keywords, OAI-PMH exposure) and BCP 47 tagging requirements used on the web and in Schema.org (inLanguage), ensuring machine-actionable discovery and UI parity. I also examine Crossref practices for translations and multilingual records (separate DOIs plus hasTranslation relationships; language metadata in deposits), treating them as constraints on deposit/harvesting logic, with PKP’s multilingual publishing guidance informing workflow ergonomics and metadata capture. The result is envisioned as an AI-assisted, ontology-driven infrastructure that resists digital colonialism by making non-English scholarship first-class, traceable, and interoperable across identifiers, catalogs, and web search surfaces.

Peer-Review Reviewed

In developing LeraLink, we inevitably have to revisit the processes of peer review and the broader question of quality metrics, especially in relation to qualitative scholarship. Conventional models of evaluation, often biased toward quantitative indicators or English-language outputs, are insufficient for an infrastructure that seeks to be language-agnostic, inclusive, and epistemically just. Reimagining peer review in this context means treating it not only as a gatekeeping mechanism but as a collaborative, multilingual, and traceable exchange that acknowledges diverse epistemic traditions. This requires new forms of quality measurement—dynamic, context-aware, and transparent—aligned with the ontology of knowledge we are building. I will continue developing these ideas in dedicated discussions with like-minded colleagues as part of the LeraLink framework.

Learning Is a Knowledge Infrastructure

Is learning—and by extension online education—truly a separate category, or is it simply a particular way of structuring, accessing, exchanging and integrating knowledge? Once we move into the domain of knowledge ontology, the distinction between “learning infra” and “knowledge infra” begins to collapse. Educational programs, especially online ones, are not more than specialized treatments of knowledge flows and communication with knowledge and particular ways of exchanging it. But knowledge is not only something to be linked. It is the foundation of wisdom and synthesis, the raw material out of which we form original thought, actual thinking, and genuine learning. If we build infrastructures that are less flawed, more inclusive, pluralistic, and just, we lay the foundation for an entirely new learning era. That conviction is precisely why Sina and I called this project Lera.Link—because learning is not separate from knowledge, but the very process of knowledge becoming alive, connected, and transformed into thought.

Will You Join?

If LAK resonates with you, this can be an invitation. Not to adopt a ready-made solution, but to join a growing conversation about how we build the next knowledge infrastructure—rigorous, multilingual, equitable, AI-native, and social. A new knowledge economy beyond the status quo. The conceptual framing, epistemic framework and intellectual exchange happens in Zenodo1 because we don’t want to wait for publication!

The horizon has never been brighter. But it will not wait.

Leave a comment