Petr Čermák working with an automated robotic system
Petr Čermák from our department has been elected head of the Physical Sciences Working Group of the EOSC CZ initiative. The elections of EOSC CZ working group leaders took place electronically from 23rd to 26th March 2026 and, according to EOSC CZ, 52% of members across the working groups took part. In the election, Petr Čermák received the support of 94% of the voting members of the Physics group.
EOSC, the European Open Science Cloud, is a European initiative focused on modern research data management. In the Czech Republic, EOSC CZ contributes to building the National Data Infrastructure, which is intended to enable researchers to securely store, manage, share, and reuse data in line with the FAIR principles — making data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The Physical Sciences Working Group brings together experts from large research infrastructures as well as smaller physics teams. Its tasks include transferring experience from international experiments into the EOSC CZ environment, supporting smaller research groups in data management, and mapping existing repositories and data standards for the needs of the physics community. The group is open to all interested members of the physics community who wish to contribute to the development of open science and modern research data management; new members are welcome.
Petr Čermák works in our MGML infrastructure, an open research infrastructure focused on the preparation and measurement of materials under various external conditions. Through his group, MGML is involved in the OP JAK projects Open Science I / National Repository Platform and Open Science II. In these projects, the team focuses in particular on repositories for physics data, electronic laboratory notebooks, and the automation of data collection from scientific instruments. The NRP project builds specialised data repositories and related services, including tools for metadata and automated data collection from instruments, while Open Science II further develops domain-specific repositories, data FAIRification, interoperability, and tools for working with research data.
“Physics produces enormous amounts of data — from large international experiments to laboratory measurements on individual instruments. For these data to have long-term value, it is not enough simply to store them somewhere. We need to know how they were created, under what conditions they were measured, how they were processed, and how someone else can safely and meaningfully return to them in the future,” says Petr Čermák. “This is precisely where I see the main role of EOSC for physics: connecting practical experience from laboratories with modern data infrastructure.” The automation of measurements and data processing has long been closely connected with Petr Čermák’s work. At the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, he teaches the course Automation in Physics, which covers measurement automation, data processing, computer vision, machine learning, robotics, and the principles of FAIR and open data.
His election as head of the Physical Sciences Working Group thus builds on professional activities that connect experimental condensed matter physics, the MGML infrastructure, automated measurements, and open science. For the Department of Condensed Matter Physics and the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, it is also an important opportunity to actively contribute to shaping the future of research data management in physics in the Czech Republic.
