A new cloud-based infrastructure to make data, tools and training available for scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities
SSHOC, 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 starts its journey in January 2019 and runs through to April 2022 with a funding support of 14.5 million euros. The aim of this project is to realise the transition from the current landscape with disciplinary silos and separated e-infrastructure facilities into a fully-fledged cloud-based infrastructure, 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.
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. The expected impacts of the Social Science and Humanities Open Science Cloud:
DARIAH-EU within SSHOC
In the SSHOC project, DARIAH-EU is leading the activities to develop an Open Marketplace, an easy-entry place where humanities scholars will find solutions and resources for the digital aspects of their research. The Open Marketplace will focus on the methodical, dynamic aspects of the research process to enable sharing and re-use not just of resources but workflows and methodologies, to promote Open Methods next to Open Data and Open Source.
Contributions to the Open Marketplace will come from several DARIAH partner institutions (the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre (PSNC) at the IBC of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the University of Göttingen), and other partners of the project (CNRS Huma-Num, CLARIN and the Semantic Web Company).
