National node E-RIHS

E-RIHS is a pan-European distributed infrastructure supported by 13 EU Member States – potential founders of the E-RIHS consortium – and with participation of six more associated countries. This initiative is also supported by the intergovernmental organization ICCROM, which is ready to help setting up the future legal entity of the global infrastructure. Currently, the national centers sharing the E-RIHS objectives are active in Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Slovenia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. 24 national nodes, including partners outside Europe, are participating in the H2020 IPERION HS (Integrating Platform for the European Research Infrastructure on Heritage Science) project, funded by the European Commission under number GA 871034.

The three-year E-RIHS PP project under the H2020 program and the H2020-INFRADEV-2016-2 call was a coordination and support action in the preparatory phase and support of the early phase of ESFRI projects in 2017-2020, i.e. the European Research Infrastructure for E-RIHS grant agreement No. 739503), which is to go into a transitional phase leading to the launch of the infrastructure this year.

The National Centers operate at the national level in various legal frameworks and represent national associations of partner facilities. The Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics of the CAS, as a leading host institution in the Czech Republic, is already involved in E-RIHS activities on a European level through its involvement in H2020 projects E-RIHS PP and IPERION HS.

On the initiative of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) institutes, a nine-member consortium was established in 2021, consisting of the CAS institutes (ITAM, NPI, IAP, IAB, IIC) and university workplaces from CTU (FNSPE, FCE), UCT and Mendel University in Brno. In December 2021, the consortium submitted a proposal for the establishment of a distributed large research infrastructure (LRI) E-RIHS.CZ in the domain of Social Sciences and Humanities. E-RIHS.CZ is the Czech large research infrastructure (LRI) for heritage science and is designed as a full-fledged national node of the European research infrastructure for heritage science (E-RIHS).

Due to the interdisciplinary character of heritage science, the involvement and cooperation of a number of research institutions is necessary. E-RIHS.CZ is therefore conceived as a distributed infrastructure consisting of nine collaborating research institutions:

Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Civil Engineering (FCE CTU)
Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering (FNSPE CTU)
Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Brno (IAB)
Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague (IAP)
Institute of Inorganic Chemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences (IIC)
Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (ITAM)
Mendel University in Brno, Faculty of Forestry and Wood Technology (FFWT MENDELU)
Nuclear Physics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (NPI)
University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague (UCT)

The backbone of the research is fixed laboratories (FIXLAB), among them (in NPI of the CAS) there are the Laboratory of Tandetron, the Laboratory of Neutron Physics and the Laboratory of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS).

The creation of the national node is based on the recommendations of the 2021 Analysis of the Sector Platform of Large Research Infrastructures of the MEYS Czech Republic: “to create a multidisciplinary research infrastructure tools for study purposes, resp. protection of cultural heritage. The Czech Republic's involvement in E-RIHS on the basis of a project of systematic use of today's existing Czech facilities and workplaces – in the form of a multidisciplinary large research infrastructure for the study and protection of cultural heritage – would undoubtedly have a positive impact on the competitiveness of many humanities and cultural heritage protection in the Czech Republic."