4th National Day of Large Research Infrastructures of the Czech Republic

On 19th November 2019, the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University hosted the 4th National Day of Large Research Infrastructures of the Czech Republic. The conference, organised by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, was attended by 180 participants and facilitated the high-level platform for strategy debates on the emerging large research infrastructure policy-making issues. This year’s event put a special emphasis on the socioeconomic impact and clustering of large research infrastructures. LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ (Digital Research Infrastructure for Language Technologies, Arts and Humanities), in which premises the conference took place, sets a good practice example of these features, being the Czech national node of the CLARIN ERIC and DARIAH ERIC pan-European research infrastructures, and providing digital technologies to serve both the top-class R&D in the culture, arts and humanities, and general public.

“This year, we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the large research infrastructures public funding instrument in the Czech Republic. Since 2009, when this instrument was introduced, the Czech Republic has become a respectable partner, operating a number of top-class open access-based R&D facilities. At the same time, the Czech Republic has also been a reliable country that participates in construction, operations and development of numerous state-of-the art R&D facilities in Europe and all around the world. At the Czech national level, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports has managed to organise two international peer-review assessments of large research infrastructures and secured substantial budgetary resources to ensure their long-term sustainable development. The 2019 update to Roadmap of Large Research Infrastructures of the Czech Republic is already the 4th edition thereof. Dr Jan Hrušák, Special Envoy for Research Infrastructures at the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, has become the Chair of European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures. These are all achievements we shall be proud of.”, stated Deputy Minister for Higher Education, Science and Research at the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports Pavel Doleček during his opening.

Socioeconomic impact and clustering of large research infrastructures

At the beginning of the conference programme, which was divided into four major sessions, attendees were given an insight into the large research infrastructures recent and future agenda development. In this regard, the 2019 update to Roadmap of Large Research Infrastructures of the Czech Republic for the years 2016-2022 was presented, with an outlook for the policy-making until 2030. Afterwards, three debate sessions followed. The first one, participated by Deputy Ministers of Industry and Trade, Environment, Health, and Labour and Social Affairs, focused on addressing the impact of large research infrastructures in terms of meeting the socioeconomic priorities that the Czech and European societies are facing. The second and third discussion panels, attended by representatives of leading Czech large research infrastructures, addressed the topic of clustering of these facilities, both at the Czech national and international level, as an instrument of finding joint solutions to common challenges by capitalising on synergies and developing joint strategy approaches. All presentations given during the conference are available for downloanding (.zip).

Ron Dekker – Relevance of Cooperation

Pavel Doleček – Large research infrastructures of the Czech Republic – policy outlook for 2030

Jan Hajič – LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ – Czech national node of CLARIN ERIC and DARIAH ERIC

Lukáš Levák – Roadmap of large research infrastructures of the Czech Republic – update 2019

Jiří Vondrášek – Power (or weakness) of Distributed Infrastructures

Allen Weeks – Exploring socioeconomic benefits and impacts of large research infrastructures

Social programme

On the occasion of the conference, an optional tour to the Malach Centre for Visual History and relics of St. Wenceslas Rotunda were arranged for the participants. During the poster session, large research infrastructure managers presented expertise, capacities and capabilities of their R&D facilities to the conference audience. A high-level press conference, attended by Deputy Ministers of Education, Youth and Sports, and above-mentioned Ministries completed the conference programme.

5th National Day of Large Research Infrastructures

The 5th National Day of Large Research Infrastructures of the Czech Republic will be organised by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports in autumn 2020. This time, the role of the host will be taken by the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, namely the CCP (Czech Centre for Phenogenomics).

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