Slovakia joins DARIAH as full member

Following years of participation in DARIAH with Cooperating Partnerships, Slovakia joined DARIAH ERIC as a full member in February 2026.

“The Board of Directors warmly welcomes Slovakia as a full member of DARIAH ERIC” said Dr. Agiatis Benardou, President of the DARIAH Board of Directors. “This milestone reflects years of dedication from the Slovak consortium and strong national support. DARIAH-SK brings valuable expertise in digital research collections, linguistic resources, and Open Science, strengthening both Central European cooperation and the wider DARIAH network. We look forward to close collaboration and to Slovakia’s active contribution to the European Research Area.”

The DARIAH-SK infrastructure

The DARIAH-SK consortium is led by the Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology, Slovak Academy of Sciences and is supported by the Ministry of Education, Research, Development and Youth of the Slovak Republic. It is a distributed research infrastructure composed of a network of geographically dispersed and coordinated domestic institutions. These institutions offer a wide range of digital and analog services to the scientific community and the general public.

The consortium consists of the following partners:

“It’s been a long journey to get Slovakia into DARIAH ERIC, and we’re thrilled to finally be here,” said Andrej Gogora, National Coordinator of DARIAH-SK. “A huge thanks goes to the Slovak Ministry of Education and the entire DARIAH-EU team for backing this vision. Now that the door is open, my focus shifts to ensuring our community takes full advantage of it. We are ready to turn this membership into real-world collaborations and make a meaningful contribution to the European research landscape.”

National priorities

The strengths of DARIAH-SK are defined by the specific expertise of its partners, with a focus on areas such as thematic research collections, open-source repository systems for presenting the tangible and intangible cultural heritage, and corpus databases and other linguistic resources. Other significant strengths include the popularization of Open Science Policy and the ethical evaluation of modern technologies. The consortium’s activities also leverage significant human capital, with dozens of researchers, technical staff, and students engaged in research, digitization, and documentation.

“Slovakia’s membership in DARIAH ERIC represents a significant milestone for our research and innovation ecosystem”, said Simona Foltinová, National representative of DARIAH ERIC on behalf of the Ministry of Education, Research, Development and Youth. “Our ministry views this step as a strategic investment in strengthening international cooperation, expanding access to advanced digital research infrastructures and supporting the active participation of Slovak institutions within the European Research Area.”

As a nascent platform, DARIAH-SK is currently in a preparatory phase, focusing on community coordination, strategic development, and securing financial resources to fulfill its mid-term priorities. DARIAH-SK is an open platform, willing to accept new thematically and professionally relevant domestic partners.

By joining DARIAH ERIC, DARIAH-SK aims to strengthen its collaboration, particularly with partners from Central Europe and the surrounding regions and to revitalize the activities of the DARIAH Central European Hub, with the participation of Czech (LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ), Austrian (CLARIAH-AT), Polish (DARIAH-PL), and Hungarian (Eötvös Loránd University) DH initiatives.

Furthermore, DARIAH-SK is interested in establishing closer collaborations with selected university departments in Slovakia to accelerate the creation and implementation of DH subjects in domestic higher education programs. The expertise of DARIAH-EU, notably on the Training and Education strategic pillar, will provide significant support for this endeavor.