Sona Arasteh

This episode of Inside EOSC features Sona Arasteh, Communication Officer at the Max Weber Foundation and Policy Officer for OPERAS, who coordinates the EOSC Opportunity Area on Open Scholarly Communication. She came to research communication by an unusual route, holding a PhD in German literature, and she now runs the communications for the LUMEN project.

We begin with what "open" actually means in scholarly communication, working through the differences between green, gold and diamond open access and the awkward economics of article processing charges. Sona explains the work of OPERAS in building infrastructure for the social sciences and humanities, the sheer breadth of what counts as research data once you move beyond the hard sciences, and how LUMEN sets out to make all of that heterogeneous material discoverable and interoperable through a living data mesh and a shared ontology, always with an eye on the question of what it is ultimately for.

From there the conversation turns to the ethics of communicating research on commercial platforms: why LUMEN chose not to use X, the quiet return to conferences and trusted personal networks, and the difference between genuine engagement and metrics that only flatter. We ask whether there could be an "open communication" counterpart to open access, and what it would take to build one. Sona reflects on the soft‑power role of the Max Weber Foundation and its overseas institutes, before returning to her own identity as a literary scholar and leaving us with an unlikely recommendation and a spot of homework.

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