Designing a Collaborative Infrastructural Cluster for the Humanities

The Czech Republic has made substantial investments in the development and support of a national landscape of large research infrastructures (RIs). Under the governance of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MEYS), a robust RIs ecosystem has evolved since 2010 and has been formally consolidated in the Roadmap of Large Research Infrastructures of the Czech Republic (Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic 2024). The Roadmap currently includes four infrastructures relevant to the humanities: the Czech Archaeological Information System, the Czech Literary Bibliography, the Czech National Corpus, and LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ. Despite the maturity of these individual infrastructures, their disciplinary specificities have posed persistent challenges for interoperability, sustainability, and community uptake. All four infrastructures are currently engaged in the implementation of the national strategic project Open Science II (OS II; 2025–2028), which aims to establish the Czech national node within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and to promote its integration into dedicated disciplinary clusters. In addition, the project supports the adoption of FAIR principles and Open Science policies within the Czech research environment. Previous research has demonstrated that FAIR principles must be operationalised in ways that reflect the epistemic and methodological specificities of the humanities rather than being applied as uniform technical standards (Tóth-Czifra 2020; Harrower et al. 2020). This contribution argues that the coordinated design of a national humanities cluster within EOSC provides an effective governance and technical model for overcoming disciplinary fragmentation while preserving domain-specific requirements. The Humanities and Arts cluster within OS II is implemented by a dedicated mini-consortium composed of experts representing the humanities-oriented RIs listed on the national Roadmap. The core activities of the Humanities and Arts cluster focus on both the creation of new disciplinary repositories (notably in bibliographic and archaeological domains) and the further development of existing ones, such as the LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ repository. A key objective is their systematic interconnection with central national solutions, including the National Metadata Directory and the National Repository Platform, in line with nationally defined technical and organisational requirements (Matyska et al. 2025). The proposed poster presents the overall design of the Czech humanities node within EOSC together with the conceptual framework underpinning the planned technical solutions and organisational interventions. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the combination of (i) shared national core services, (ii) discipline-specific repository layers, and (iii) community-driven governance supported by centrally coordinated FAIR and EOSC compliance. This architecture is designed to accommodate the specific requirements of individual scholarly communities while enabling interoperability with international disciplinary networks and alignment with central national infrastructures. While grounded in the Czech context, the model presented here is applicable to other countries with heterogeneous humanities infrastructures seeking to balance national coordination, disciplinary autonomy, and EOSC interoperability. The case further illustrates the critical role of a national funding and policy authority in enabling long-term coordination across research infrastructures and ensuring sustainability beyond individual project cycles. The poster provides practical insights into the design, governance, and implementation of collaborative humanities infrastructures aligned with EOSC and FAIR principles.