The humanities, social sciences and cultural sciences in Europe will benefit from even better open science infrastructures. The "Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud" project, which was launched at the beginning of January 2019, lays an important cornerstone for this. The project makes an important contribution to a common European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) is a project funded by the EU research funding programme Horizon 2020 which aims to provide an open cloud ecosystem for the humanities and social sciences. To this end, data and tools will be developed and published along the entire research data cycle. The developments will be accompanied by extensive communication and training offerings that link people with social science and humanities data and services. The European Research Infrastructures (ERICs) in the social sciences and humanities will support the project, which will be led by CESSDA ERIC, the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives. A total of 45 organisations from all over Europe are involved in the project. The project runs from January 2019 to April 2022 and is funded with around 14.5 million euros.
In Austria, the research infrastructures AUSSDA and the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ACDH-OeAW) are involved in the project. With the Semantic Web Company, a domestic technology company is also involved in the project. In Austria, for example, the communication strategy of the project is being developed, a European data marketplace for the social sciences and humanities is being programmed and data on national elections is being prepared.
Together, the above-mentioned and numerous other initiatives of the project will represent the contribution of the humanities, social sciences and cultural sciences to the so-called European Open Science Cloud. The European Open Science Cloud will provide researchers with access to free and open digital data services. The EU wants to use it to expand its global leadership in the field of scientific data infrastructures. As part of the Austrian Presidency of the EU Council, the governance structure of the European Open Science Cloud was adopted in Vienna through the Vienna Declaration on the European Open Science Cloud.
The fact that different European research institutions such as CESSDA, European Social Survey (ESS), Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH), Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) or the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) will collaborate intensively shows the broad scope and potential of the project. In this respect, this project not only creates better infrastructures for the social sciences and humanities in Europe; it strengthens the coalescence in Europe.
