In this series, we share short interviews to introduce you to the diverse partners contributing to our LUMEN vision. Each month, we shine a spotlight on two of our partners—offering a glimpse into who they are, what they do, and what drives their work within LUMEN. In this edition, Elena Sokolova and Fotis Mystakopoulos answered our questions.
Can you briefly introduce your organisation and its role within the LUMEN project?
OPERAS is the European Research Infrastructure for open scholarly communication in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). It coordinates a distributed network working to advance open, multilingual, and community-driven research practices. Within LUMEN, OPERAS leads the development of the governance model and the white label platform promotion, as well as the community engagement activities. It also contributes to innovation development, strategic planning, and the alignment of the platform with the wider EOSC ecosystem. In addition, OPERAS supports dissemination and engagement efforts, including the project’s visual identity, communication toolkit and co-organisation of outreach events. OPERAS’ role is to ensure that the LUMEN platform reflects the knowledge structures, multilingual needs, and infrastructural realities of SSH research across Europe. Furthermore, OPERAS brings a strong background in the SSH Scientific Domain and extensive experience in building discovery platforms through initiatives such as GoTriple.
What is the most exciting aspect of your contribution to LUMEN, and how does it align with your organisation’s mission or values?
Elena: One of the most meaningful and intellectually rewarding aspects of this work is the chance to shape how governance operates in a distributed, cross-institutional infrastructure. In Task 7.4, the focus is on developing practical mechanisms for coordination, decision-making, and shared responsibility across different types of actors. This includes working closely with the technical teams to ensure that governance structures align with architectural choices and reflect the diversity of institutional contexts. There is also ongoing involvement in innovation and outreach, particularly where governance questions intersect with stakeholder engagement and communication. A key concern is making sure that participation models are not only well-designed, but also understandable and usable by different communities involved in the project. These areas of work reflect how OPERAS approaches infrastructure more broadly – not just as a set of tools, but as something shaped by the people who use and maintain it.
Fotis: Governance is a cornerstone for ensuring the long-term sustainability and relevance of the White Label Platform. OPERAS is strongly committed to the POSI Principles, which advocate for infrastructures that are community-led, transparent, and self-sustaining, values that are deeply embedded in the Open Science movement.What makes this work particularly rewarding is the opportunity to engage with a wide range of communities, both within the SSH and across other disciplines represented in LUMEN. OPERAS has always seen community engagement as foundational to infrastructure design. Through in-person and online formats such as hackathons, seminars, and webinars, we actively seek input from users during development. These moments of interaction not only validate our approach but also help shape the services in ways that are truly aligned with researchers’ needs. It’s this iterative, participatory process that makes governance not just a structural concern, but a dynamic and evolving practice.
LUMEN is all about interdisciplinary collaboration. How do you envision the project transforming the way research is conducted?
Fotis: Several activities within LUMEN operate at the cutting edge of data science, data analytics, and the integration of services and tools with AI capabilities. WP6, in particular, is developing a range of innovative features, such as metasearch functionality, visualisation tools, and an AI-powered chatbot, that are informed by the diverse characteristics of the project’s participating domains. Each domain brings its own research traditions, analytical approaches, and preferred data sources. This diversity presents a valuable opportunity for cross-domain knowledge exchange, enabling each community to explore and adopt new functionalities that could enrich their research practices within the LUMEN framework.
Elena: LUMEN creates conditions for different communities to work together across disciplines, institutional roles, or methodological approaches. This kind of collaboration is built into the project’s architecture and vision, rather than treated as an add-on. It enables new forms of interaction that are difficult to support within isolated systems making space for knowledge exchange across domains without imposing uniformity. The project doesn’t prescribe a single model for interdisciplinarity. Instead, it supports spaces where exchanges can happen – through discovery, through governance, and through ongoing interaction between people with different expertise. As observed in other contexts, including in the work of Prof. Alex Pentland from MIT, meaningful innovation often arises at such points of contact. LUMEN creates the structural and social preconditions for this kind of emergence.
Looking ahead to 2027 and beyond, what impact do you hope the LUMEN project will have on the broader research community and beyond?
Fotis: Perhaps one of the most meaningful impacts we can hope to achieve by 2027 is to offer a blueprint for how diverse communities can collaborate, learn from one another, and collectively drive progress. We also aim to establish concrete solutions that embody the responsible use of AI, while providing a platform that not only supports current needs but also lays the foundation for future integration, with other scientific communities and with evolving, more flexible and secure technological solutions.
Elena: If LUMEN succeeds, its long-term impact may lie in how it helps research communities take more ownership of the systems they rely on. The goal is to strengthen the capacity for self-organisation, alignment, and shared learning across domains.