Realising the Social Sciences and Humanities for the European Open Science Cloud - EOSC Hub

The Social Sciences and Humanities Open Science Cloud (SSHOC) is one of the five European Union H2020 Programme “ INFRA-EOSC-2018” recently funded cluster projects (together with ENVRI-FAIR, PANOSC, ESCAPE, EOSC-LIFE) that will leverage and interconnect existing and new infrastructures from the SSH ERICs and foster interdisciplinary research and collaboration.

An ambitious number of 47 organisations, experienced and skilled in Social Science & Humanities Infrastructures have gathered from all over Europe to collaborate together on SSHOC, the Social Science and Humanities Open Science Cloud project, coordinated by the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA). The project started its journey in January 2019 and runs through to April 2022 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.

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.

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. The expected impacts of the Social Science and Humanities Open Science Cloud:

• The social sciences and humanities are seamlessly integrated in the European Open Science Cloud.
• Availability of an EU wide; easy to use SSH Open Marketplace, where tools and data are open available.
• EU wide availability of high quality SSH data.
• EU wide availability of trusted and secure access mechanisms for SSH data, confirming to EU legal requirements.
• State of the art advanced through dedicated SSH data pilots cluster projects.
• Data sharing is the new normal among the different SSH communities.

A task force will be set up with EOSC-hub project to exchange and harmonize views on common themes, and existing contacts with other European and international organizations operating in and around the EOSC space will be invited to engage in the process.

Authors: Vasso Kalaitzi; Marieke Willems