Creating reproducible research workflows does not come naturally to arts and humanities researchers. Thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Marketplace (SSHOMP), narrative workflows that describe and contextualise research tools and services are becoming more commonplace (Barbot et al., 2024 & Candela et al., 2023). However, enabling researchers to repeat, reproduce or reuse existing workflows supposes that they are actionable. This requires appropriate infrastructure and consideration of different modes of reproduction, taking into account research questions, datasets and methods of analysis or tools (Schöch, 2023). Structuring workflows for others to understand and adapt them is crucial for reproducibility and reuse (Rule et al., 2019).

From the perspective of the DARIAH Annual Event 2026 theme, actionable workflows transform infrastructures from static collections of services into collaborative research platforms. They encourage transparent sharing of methods and increase the social value of publicly funded research by enabling scholars to build on each other’s work.

Despite growing awareness of workflows’ role in implementing the FAIR principles their integration into scholarly practice remains challenging. Experiences from the SSHOMP and the ATRIUM project show that guidelines alone are insufficient, especially in interdisciplinary contexts (Oberbichler et al., 2021). Writing workflows is iterative and time-consuming, requires editorial oversight and lacks clear academic incentives. In practice, workflows are very seldom reused, and researchers often struggle to assess how easily they can be adapted beyond the dataset for which they were originally developed.

To address these challenges, the OSCARS project which promotes the uptake of Open Science in Europe, explores ‘composability’: the ability to combine modular components into more complex and reconfigurable systems. Workflow engines play a key role by facilitating the implementation of actionable workflows. For example, Galaxy, an open-source data analysis platform originally developed in bioinformatics (Galaxy Community, 2024), now supports Digital Humanities (Schneider, Leendertse, 2025). Galaxy enables the creation and execution of reproducible workflows without programming, supports the use of High-Performance Computing (HPC), and tracks all analytical steps. In OSCARS, Galaxy is used to reproduce an OCR-based workflow for analysing historical newspapers.

Another example is AEON (dAriah sErvice Oriented iNfrastructure), developed by DARIAH-IT within the H2IOSC project, which supports the transition to Open Science in Italy by federating the national nodes of 4 European Research Infrastructures —CLARIN, DARIAH, E-RIHS, and OPERAS. AEON is a Low Code / No Code platform providing advanced service orchestration capabilities, allowing researchers to create and execute reproducible, secure, and scalable research pipelines. Within H2IOSC, AEON automates the FAIRification and semantic transformation of heterogeneous digital collections, towards the creation of interoperable knowledge bases from diverse cultural heritage resources, ensuring their long-term accessibility and reuse.

This paper focuses on two examples - Galaxy and AEON - within a growing infrastructure ecosystem of services and platforms, including EOSC, ECCCH, and HPC-based initiatives. It argues that DARIAH can bridge the “last mile” (Koureas, 2016) between infrastructures and research communities by testing and guiding adoption of actionable workflows. Working across the spectrum of workflow types has significant potential to foster open, reproducible and collaborative research in the digital arts and humanities.