CESSDA and its data Service Providers take part in a number of international projects of relevance to its mission. CESSDA AS is a grant beneficiary in three Horizon 2020 projects as follows:

Big Data Europe
Empowering Communities with Data Technologies

CESSDA’s role is to coordinate the input of the members of the Societal Challenge 6: Europe in a changing world – Inclusive, reflective and innovative society, through workshops, in order to build a requirements specification for a new Big Data Aggregator. Once built, the Aggregator will be used by CESSDA members and others in order to explore the value of big data, as well as to evaluate the benefits of these new data sources to the social sciences and humanities, and learn the implications of managing and preserving these sources of data from the perspective of an archive. A project overview can be seen here.

CESSDA SaW
Strengthening and Widening the European Infrastructure for the Social Science Data Archives

CESSDA AS is the coordinator of the CESSDA SaW project. This is a 2-year project with the primary ambition to establish the conditions for a seamless social science data archive service for the whole of the European Research Area (ERA), capable of supporting the research needs of the next generation of social scientists wherever they may be. The overarching impact of the project will be to initiate the transformation of the user experience of social science data in the ERA, resulting in a transformation of the evidence and insight available to those tackling the social and economic issues of Europe.

As project coordinator, CESSDA is heavily involved in all aspects of the project. Tasks to be carried out by the project will range from the establishment of a knowledge-sharing platform for ERA data archives and a hub, delivering a state of play evaluation of social science data archives and services in European Economic Area countries, identifying gaps and bottlenecks in existing services and producing national development plans to close the gaps and overcome present barriers. Another objective of the project is to enlarge and strengthen CESSDA through knowledge exchange between current members and potential or aspiring members. This will involve benchmarking CESSDA against a leading inter-institutional consortium of data archives, initiating a permanent forum for knowledge and information exchange as well as exploring and seeking support for an international curriculum for the professional development of practitioners in social science data services. A project overview can be seen here.

SERISS
Synergies for Europe's Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences

SERISS is a 4-year project which brings together three research infrastructures in the social sciences: the European Social Survey (ESS), the Survey for Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA). Also involved in SERISS are non-ESFRI research infrastructures: Generations and Gender Programme (GGP), European Values Survey (EVS) and the Wage Indicator Survey. It aims to exploit potential synergies and overcome existing fragmentation across infrastructures in order to enhance the key role played by these infrastructures, which form the bedrock of empirical social science in Europe. SERISS will focus on three broad themes: addressing key challenges for cross-national data collection, breaking down barriers between infrastructures and embracing the future of social sciences.

CESSDA’s involvement in the project covers a number of areas, from empirically assessing the quality of thesaurus keywords for questionnaire items, to interactive tools for cross-national surveys, such as a survey Project Management Portal and a Data Harmonisation Platform. An important aim of the SERISS project is also to share learning and expertise between project infrastructures and with the wider social science community. Finally, the project will address the major legal and ethical challenges facing cross-national social science research, which relies on access to large-scale data on an individual level. A project overview can be seen here.

Next section: Other forms of collaboration