IASSIST
IASSIST is an international organisation of professionals working in and with information technology and data services to support research and teaching in the social sciences. CESSDA Service Providers have been actively involved in the annual conferences of IASSIST for several years. Furthermore, a number of staff of CESSDA Service Providers are members of IASSIST, which brings together 300 members from a variety of workplaces, including data archives, statistical agencies, research centres, libraries, academic departments, government departments, and non-profit organisations.
RDA
RDA (Research Data Alliance) is working on building the social and technical bridges to facilitate data sharing and re-use. Given that data and scientific collaboration are global, it is only natural that this activity must be executed within a global framework. Bridges must also be built across disciplines as increasingly research questions can only be addressed and answered if data and knowledge from various disciplines are included. Even though RDA is still a relatively young initiative - launched in March 2013 - the first outputs of the start-up working groups have been produced and are now entering a subsequent phase focusing on testing these outputs in several real community applications, encouraging communities to adopt solutions and adapting the outputs based on concrete implementation cases.
In addition to engaging with all European stakeholders, communities and organisations alike, through events, papers, presentations, interviews (etc.), CESSDA was invited to the 2015 RDA Plenary meeting as a potential partner in the consortium.
ICPSR
ICPSR (Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research) is an international consortium of more than 700 academic institutions and research organisations. ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. CESSDA is actively involved in regular ICPSR meetings, and regular communication channels are established with the Main Office which led to joint participation in European Horizon 2020 project CESSDA SaW (Strengthening and Widening) where the ICPSR will serve as the “industry best” or “gold standard” organisation against which CESSDA will be benchmarked. CESSDA has a standing invitation to the ICPSR Council Meetings.
Eurostat
In 2014, Eurostat started to work on a research strategy for European statistics microdata together with the European Statistical System (ESS). On a meeting held in February 2015, CESSDA was asked to present possibilities for future cooperation. A draft proposal on opportunities to have a permanent working relationship between CESSDA and the European Statistical System was prepared in June 2015. The final cooperation proposal paper was presented by Eurostat to the European Statistics System Committee (ESSC) during their 26th meeting held on 24 September 2015 in Lisbon. The first Big Data Europe project workshop in the domain of social sciences took place at the offices of Eurostat in Luxembourg in November 2015. A videoconference between CESSDA and Eurostat was held in December 2015. Details of the future cooperation as well as the signing of Memorandum of Understanding will be addressed during 2016.
Next chapter: Looking ahead