Research does not become public knowledge simply because a file has been uploaded. Visibility, accessibility, persistence, findability, citation, interpretation and reuse are different conditions, and none guarantees the others. A page may circulate widely and disappear; a DOI may preserve an address without ensuring that the underlying material is understandable; an archive may retain files whose relationships have become illegible. Publication is consequently an additional transformation of evidence rather than the final administrative stage of research. ScalarArchitecture follows the passage from dataset to publication, from publication to archive and from archive to an emerging field of connected knowledge. Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Filmados, blog networks, repositories and indexed research objects make this question concrete: a work can acquire new forms of circulation, comparison and authorship after its first appearance, but every new manifestation risks losing parts of its original context. Metadata, versioning and provenance help preserve a route backwards, while cross-references open routes forwards towards questions that did not exist when the source was produced. An object’s public biography is therefore neither identical with its original event nor reducible to the number of places it appears. It consists of the transformations through which other people can find it, evaluate it and use it without confusing visibility with validity. The purpose of an open research infrastructure is not endless accumulation. It is to lower the cost of understanding and responsibly reactivating what has already been made.
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