Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) launched to pool community research infrastructure excellence

Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) launched to pool community research infrastructure excellence

SSHOC, one of the five European Union H2020 Programme “ INFRA-EOSC-2018” recently funded cluster projects (together with ENVRI-FAIR, PANOSC, ESCAPE, EOSC-LIFE), will leverage and interconnect existing and new infrastructures from the social science and humanities (SSH) ERICs (European Research Infrastructure Consortium) and foster interdisciplinary research and collaboration. 

An ambitious number of 47 organisations, including Trust-IT Services, experienced and skilled in Social Science & Humanities Infrastructures, have gathered from all over Europe to collaborate together on SSHOC, coordinated by the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA). 

The project starts its journey in January 2019 and runs through to April 2022 with a funding support of 14.5 million euros to realise the transition from the current landscape with disciplinary silos and separated e-infrastructure facilities into a fully-fledged cloud-based infrastructure where data are FAIR, tools and training readily accessible, thus providing a significant contribution towards achieving the vision put forward by the European Cloud Initiative and support the implementation of European Open Science Cloud.

 

 “To realise the Social Data Cloud, where data, tools and training are made available to data users,  the ESFRI’s will  join forces with the other social sciences and humanities ERICs (CESSDA, DARIAH, CLARIN, ESS, SHARE) as well as other international organisations. Such a cooperation is vital to ensure the best possible result for users. It also ensures that the expertise across the fields is shared, as inclusive as possible and made available. Moreover, it stimulates multidisciplinary collaboration and has the potential for greater social impact.” - SSHOC Coordinator Ron Dekker.

 

For the first time all European Social Science and Humanities’ Research Infrastructures join forces to build the social sciences and humanities’ part of the European Open Science Cloud

All SSH ESFRI Landmarks and Projects (CESSDA, ESS, DARIAH, CLARIN and SHARE), relevant international SSH data infrastructures and the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER) participate in the SSHOC project ensuring an inclusive approach. 

The consortium has the expertise to cover the whole data cycle: from data creation and curation to optimal re-use of data and can address training and advocacy to increase actual re-use of data. 

The consortium is also very well placed to address SSH specific challenges such as the distributed character of its infrastructures, multi-linguality, huge internal complexity of some of the data it deals with and secured access to sensitive data. 

Harnessing the innovation potential of infrastructural support for digital open scholarship

The project will pool, harmonize and make easily usable tools and services that will allow to process, enrich, analyse and compare the vast heterogeneous collections of SSH data available across the boundaries of individual repositories or institutions in Europe. 

The project will build the common SSH Cloud, maximise reuse through Open Science and FAIR principles, interconnect existing and new infrastructures and set up a Governance for SSH-EOSC. 

 

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Publication date: 20 May 2019