OSCARS / EOSC — Project 02-725

Ethical Research Infrastructure for Hateful, Antidemocratic and Discriminatory Data

Across Europe, datasets documenting radicalisation and discrimination online (antisemitism, hate speech, extremism, and anti-democratic discourse) remain locked in institutional silos: legally constrained, technically isolated, and inaccessible to the researchers who need them most.


ERIHAD.OS is building the governance and technical framework to change that: a federated, EOSC-compatible infrastructure that makes sensitive research data findable and responsibly accessible - without centralising it, without compromising legal obligations, and without sacrificing scientific value.

Project Information
Programme OSCARS / EOSC (2nd Open Call)
Duration 24 months
Feb 2026 - Jan 2028
Coordinator Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung (ZfA), TU Berlin
Partners Tero PC (Greece)
IUCIE, Univ. of Valencia (Spain)
Contact info@erihados.eu
Partners
 
The Project

Opening sensitive research data responsibly

Research on various forms of discrimination (antisemitism, racism, extremism, and hate speech) increasingly relies on large datasets collected from social media, reporting platforms, and monitoring initiatives. These datasets contain sensitive or harmful content and therefore remain confined within institutional silos due to legal, ethical, and technical constraints.

ERIHAD.OS addresses this challenge by developing an ethical and technical framework that allows such datasets to become findable and responsibly accessible within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), while fully respecting data protection law, ethical safeguards, and institutional data sovereignty.

The project explores how publicly funded research data containing harmful or discriminatory content can be shared responsibly with researchers and civil society without violating legal or ethical boundaries.

Key Objectives
  • Identify barriers to sharing sensitive datasets on hate, discrimination, and extremism across European research institutions and civil society organisations
  • Develop governance models for ethically and legally constrained research data, building on GDPR compliance and sector-specific anti-hate legislation
  • Enable responsible data access through EOSC-compatible federated infrastructures using a multilayered tiered access model
  • Support collaboration between universities, NGOs, monitoring organisations, and data infrastructures across Europe
  • Strengthen European research capacity on antisemitism, racism, and democratic resilience through co-creation with stakeholders
  • Position ERIHAD.OS as a proof of concept that can scale toward Horizon Europe funding and full EOSC integration
About ERIHAD.OS

Why this matters, and how we approach it

The Challenge

Across Europe, universities, NGOs, and monitoring organisations collect large datasets documenting various forms of discrimination. Many of these datasets are created with public funding, yet they remain inaccessible to other researchers because they contain sensitive or harmful content.

Legal restrictions — above all GDPR, but also country and sector-specific anti-hate legislation — combined with the absence of shared governance frameworks prevent these datasets from being integrated into open research infrastructures. As a result, valuable knowledge remains fragmented across institutions, and cross-sectoral, multilingual research is practically impossible at scale.

Pseudonymisation does not eliminate legal constraints; deletion of original data does not substitute for an appropriate lawful basis. ERIHAD.OS takes these realities seriously rather than working around them.

Understanding the dynamics of discrimination requires access to large, diverse, and multilingual datasets. Without mechanisms for responsible data sharing, European research remains fragmented, methodologically limited, and less effective in informing policy.

The ERIHAD.OS Approach

ERIHAD.OS does not build a centralised repository of sensitive data. Instead, the project develops an ethical governance and infrastructure model that enables distributed datasets to remain where they are — following data sovereignty principles — while becoming:

  • Findable Discoverable through the SSH Open Marketplace and EOSC Portal
  • Accessible Via a three-tier access system — full access for vetted researchers; snippet-level access for limited queries; tool-based access for aggregated results
  • Interoperable Using standardised metadata aligned with CESSDA, CLARIN, and DARIAH protocols
  • Reusable For legitimate research under clear ethical guidelines and data governance agreements

This approach aligns with FAIR principles while directly addressing the specific challenges posed by datasets containing hateful or discriminatory material. The project is explicitly designed as a proof of concept for future scaling under Horizon Europe and other major research infrastructure funding lines.

Consortium

The partners building ERIHAD.OS

 
Coordinator
Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung (ZfA), TU Berlin - Germany

One of Europe's leading research institutions studying antisemitism, racism, and discrimination in their historical and contemporary forms. With one of the largest archives of antisemitic material in Europe and extensive experience in multilingual, cross-cultural research, the ZfA coordinates ERIHAD.OS and leads the development of ethical and legal governance frameworks for sensitive research data, stakeholder networking, and EOSC integration.

Technical Partner
Tero PC - Thessaloniki, Greece

A technology company specialising in digital infrastructures, data platforms, and EU-funded research projects — with a track record including citizen science initiatives, web archiving (via the BlogForever project with CERN), and participatory environmental governance tools. In ERIHAD.OS, TERO leads the technical architecture: federated local node infrastructure, metadata harvesting, and the anonymisation pipeline.

Co-Creation & Education Partner
IUCIE, University of Valencia - Spain

The International University Centre for Research on European Culture and Innovation in Education brings expertise in co-creation methodology, media analysis, digital discourse research, and European democratic resilience. With active CERV-funded projects on online hate and connections to monitoring networks in Southern Europe — including OBERAXE and the Simone Veil Chair — IUCIE leads co-creation workshops and stakeholder engagement.

News

Latest updates

February
2026
Project Launch

ERIHAD.OS officially launched

The ERIHAD.OS project has officially started with partners from Germany, Greece, and Spain. Over the next 24 months, the project will develop an ethical governance and technical framework enabling responsible access to sensitive research data on hate speech, antisemitism, and discrimination within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

ERIHAD.OS is funded within the OSCARS framework, which supports the development of services for the European Open Science Cloud. More updates will follow as the project progresses through its implementation tasks.