Providing a broad and sustainable research infrastructure enables the research community to carry out high-quality research in the social sciences. The Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA ERIC) aims at achieving full European coverage by strengthening and widening the European infrastructure of social science data archives. Thanks to the Horizon 2020 funding program of the European Commission, CESSDA ERIC was able to implement these objectives in the CESSDA SaW (Strengthening and Widening) project.
Strengthening and Widening
The aim of the project was not only to create the preconditions for bringing new members to the European consortium, but also to identify and eliminate any deficits and obstacles with existing CESSDA members in order to establish a high-quality European network in which all members can benefit from each other.
Currently, there are national data archives in Europe that are not yet CESSDA members but are in an observer role. The project also aimed to support these observers on their way to membership, as well as to analyze the potentials of other countries that do not yet have an established infrastructure for social scientific data archiving.
A new beginning?
Last week's final conference in Dublin, in which numerous representatives of European data archives (Service Providers) participated, provided a summary of the successful two-year project that began in 2015. Although AUSSDA was not operational until the end of 2016, it was already able to contribute to the project as a full member of CESSDA ERIC, participating in all three SaW conferences of 2017.
The final conference was hosted by the University College Dublin, which is home to the Irish Social Science Data Archive (ISSDA). ISSDA has been in existence since 2000 and is striving to become a member of the European consortium. Not least because of the support of CESSDA SaW, the preconditions are very good as became clear through the speeches of representatives from the Research Council of Ireland and the European Commission.
It was agreed at the conference that previous successful CESSDA SaW activities should be continued in the future and new activities have to take place. This is why CESSDA ERIC is currently positioning itself for further promising project funding within Horizon 2020.
