The Syntagma Platform

Layer model of a free research infrastructure — from the basement lab upward, docking on instead of building twice

Thomas Schüller · Syntagma Forschung Wien · slug: syntagma-plattform
ORCID 0009-0003-9799-6747 · forschung@tschueller.com · Vienna / Tulln, Austria · Licence: CC BY 4.0

1 The claim: an interface that does not exist as such

Research costs — time, equipment, access, knowledge of the paths. Who can afford it still depends substantially on parental home, title and institution. The Syntagma platform is directed against exactly this dependence: a connecting point between academics and non-academics, between disciplines, sectors, hobby, private, trade and industry — without affiliation requirement, without paywalls, without secret knowledge, all on the same level. Independent as a workshop, at the same time umbrella and background service for others: research input, networking, mediation, advice, advocacy for open science. Generalists seek specialists and other generalists; DIY research is connected with institutions instead of set against them. Radically open — and strictly legal: diamond open access instead of circumvention, disclosure instead of head start.

2 Honest landscape: much already exists — and that is good

Whoever designs a free research platform must first acknowledge what the open-science world has already built, and must not duplicate it:

• Identity: ORCID gives every person a free, persistent researcher identifier — without an institution.
• Archive & DOI: Zenodo (CERN) accepts every research object free of charge and issues citable, versioned DOIs, for everyone.
• Open metadata: OpenAlex provides the catalogue of world research as a free database with an open API.
• Modular work chain: Octopus (Jisc/UKRI-funded) publishes research as eight linked units — problem, hypothesis, method, data, analysis, interpretation, application, review — free of charge, in any language, via ORCID login and explicitly open to researchers outside academia. It is the closest relative of the master chain conceived here.
• Workflow & lab notebook: OSF (Center for Open Science) for projects and preregistration; eLabFTW as an open-source, self-hostable electronic lab notebook; protocols.io for methods.
• Open hardware & community labs: the GOSH movement and the CERN Open Hardware Licence for instruments; community labs such as Genspace (New York) as proof that safe, public lab work outside institutes works.
• Assessment reform: DORA and CoARA against metric fixation; PREreview for open review including by the non-established.

Consequence as building principle: dock on instead of building twice. Identity, DOIs, metadata, publication chain — all of this is used, not rebuilt.

3 What the own workshop already covers

In parallel there exists an own, open-source tool family with a shared exchange format — individual instruments that already map onto the stages of the master chain:

4 The real gap

Honestly examined, three fields remain that no existing platform occupies:

1. The overall interface. There is open identity, open archives, open publication chains — but no place that connects academia and DIY, hobby and industry, all disciplines and languages as one continuous chain, with translation and intelligibility as acceptance criterion. The parts exist; the connecting point is missing.
2. Participation upon monetisation. No existing system couples free use with a fixed backflow once money is earned (RETURN, thesis paper P3) — the open-source world debates sustainability but has no discretion-free participation mechanism.
3. Relations instead of citations. Citation graphs connect papers within the scholarly world; the knotenwerk connects heterogeneous works — theory, device, dataset, manual — across discipline and format boundaries as explicit, consultable relations.

5 The layer model

From this follows the architecture: at the base the transdisciplinary main layer — open access for all, the layer of mutual understanding; above it the master chain theory → experiment → evaluation → fine-tuning → data/database, feedback-coupled; across it the two binding layers connection (knotenwerk, translation) and participation (RETURN, reputation); beneath, the docking points to the open world. Specialisations and refinements grow layer by layer on top — following the questions' needs, not a plan.

Scaling without a break: the same structure carries from the basement lab through the shared workshop to an own campus. Every expansion stage is fully functional — only the reach grows, never the access barrier. Capital accumulates differently here: not as the head start of a few, but as a common stock of instruments, data, works and skills, openly accounted — input and output transparent.

6 Building principles

• Dock on instead of duplicating: ORCID for identity, Zenodo for DOIs, OpenAlex for metadata, the Octopus model for the modular work chain, Git for versions.
• Portable and sovereign: statically generatable, self-hostable, EU-suitable, without lock-in; every module replaceable and forkable (AGPL).
• No information advantage: everything the platform knows, everyone knows — instructions, budgets, failures included.
• Intelligibility as sign-off: what only one discipline understands is unfinished (system paper §3).
• Limits: no paywalls, no arms — not via partners either.

→ Further

The operating order behind this model: system paper "The Syntagma System" · the usage order: thesis paper "The Order of Sharing".

§ References (selection, state 2025/2026)