Czech Republic

CESNET, the country’s mandated organisation in the EOSC Association, is involved in several EOSC-related projects: PaNOSC, EOSC-Synergy, CS3MESH4EOSC, EGI-ACE, DICE, C-SCALE, and EOSC-FUTURE. This shows a good degree of integration in the EOSC community.

On the policy front, the Czech National Strategy for Open Access to Research Information for 2017-2020 was approved by the Government in 2017, followed by the corresponding Action Plan for the Implementation of the National Strategy of the Czech Republic’s Open Access to Scientific Information for 2017-2020 in 2019. While a full national policy is still in the works, the existence of all these initiatives, some of them with explicit support or initiated by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport indicate that this could be achieved in the near future.

Mandated organisation

CESNET (main contact: Luděk Matyska), appointed as EOSC-A Mandated Organisation by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport of the Czech Republic, is the association of universities  and the Czech Academy of Sciences. CESNET’s operates and develops of the national e-infrastructure for science, research and education which encompasses a computer network, computational grids, data storage and collaborative environment and further offers in addition several services to its members.

National structure

To coordinate all activities linked to the implementation of EOSC in the country, the e-INFRA CZ consortium has launched the national initiative EOSC-CZ to supersede the EOSC Coordination Board of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports previously in place. In 2023, the EOSC-CZ Secretariat has put under the same roof the staff in charge of the daily operations of EOSC-related matters based at the CERIT-SC, the national centre for computing and data storage infrastructure for research and development, at the Masaryk University in Brno.

Other Open Science stakeholders in the country include:

• National Library of Technology (coordinator of Open Science policy)
• Czech Rectors Conference
• Czech Academy of Sciences
• Czech Science Foundation and Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, main funding agency for research
• Council for Research, Development and Innovation (an advisory body to the Government of the Czech Republic)

Working groups

EOSC CZ involves the academic and research community in the implementation of the EOSC in the Czech Republic through several Working Groups (WGs), aimed at achieving consensus among national players about the design and development of EOSC. Besides proposals towards its architectural, operation and metadata, the WGs have within their remit the development of binding standards for the implementation of the National Data Infrastructure (NDI). The WGs are divided in two sub-groups:

• Core (cross-cutting) working groups: these WGs aim to find consensus over a common ground, architecture and shared services across the NDI, and include representatives from various disciplines and with different expertise.
• Thematic (discipline) working groups: The main objective of these WGs is to find a consensus on the needs, the integration of the thematic architecture into the common environment, and specific services of the thematic (discipline) clusters of the NDI. They comprise mainly experts from the given discipline units that represent so-called “thematic (discipline) clusters”.

The WGs are open to all researchers working at Czech institutions. For more information, please visit https://www.eosc.cz/en/working-groups.

The FAIR Data Expert Group at CERIT-SC is the national OpenAIRE node.