The persistent research and innovation gap between Western and Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries cannot be reduced solely through funding schemes or policy mandates. Sustainable change requires functioning communities of practice; networks of institutions, researchers, mentors, and societal actors that share infrastructures, knowledge, and standards in an open and responsible manner. Alliance4Life_BRIDGE (A4L_BRIDGE; Horizon Europe, Grant Agreement 101136453) brings together progressive life-science and medical research institutions from CEE countries with the aim of strengthening research excellence, institutional reform, and doctoral training (Alliance4Life, 2024; European Commission, 2024).

This contribution presents the role of the University of Zagreb School of Medicine (UZSM), the Croatian partner institution in A4L_BRIDGE, with a particular focus on scholarly communication, open infrastructures, and shared governance of doctoral education as activities that illustrate how shared infrastructures can reshape research culture and scholarly communication practices.

A central component is the development of two alliance-wide infrastructures coordinated by UZSM: the Database of Mentors and the Database of Thesis Committee Members. These openly searchable databases enable partner institutions to identify international experts for doctoral supervision and PhD thesis committees. Their purpose is not only administrative, but structural: reducing academic inbreeding, increasing transparency in doctoral evaluation, and enabling transnational peer review and mentorship across institutional and national borders, thus operationalising recommendations of the European Charter for Researchers (European Commission, 2005).

The second major element is the Virtual Research Centre (VRC), an online platform connecting researchers through thematic departments that organise online seminars, journal clubs, mini-conferences, and collaborative activities. UZSM researchers coordinate departments in cardiovascular research and membrane biochemistry (Sedlić, 2025a), while the platform also channels researchers towards Seed Fund and Open Call instruments intended to stimulate new collaborative projects and generate preliminary data for larger competitive proposals. The experience of the VRC demonstrates how a virtual community can convert dispersed expertise into joint research planning and shared publications.

Third focus area concerns capacity building in doctoral education and research integrity through workshops for doctoral programme directors and early-career mentors, organised in collaboration with ORPHEUS, complemented by an e-learning platform that hosts educational resources openly accessible across partner institutions (ORPHEUS et al., 2012). These and other collaborative activities underscore how European university alliances like UNIC or YUFE and thematic research alliances such as Alliance4Life are complementary communities of internationalisation (Sedlić, 2025b).

Three lessons emerge from these first years of implementation. First, durable Open Science communities in CEE depend less on isolated open-access mandates and more on shared, openly governed infrastructures such as mentor databases, virtual research environments, and common educational resources. Second, doctoral education represents a strategically important dimension of open scholarly communication because transnational mentorship and committee composition influence research quality, integrity, and institutional culture. Third, smaller national research communities benefit disproportionately from participation in transnational alliances that share governance, responsibility, and infrastructure. The UZSM experience within A4L_BRIDGE thus offers a transferable model of how a single institution can both contribute to and benefit from a community-driven approach to Open Science in life sciences.