Periodic Reporting for period 3 - SSHOC (Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-01-01 bis 2022-04-30
The Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) united 53 expert partner institutions in realising the vision articulated by the EC in 2016 - to offer researchers in the social sciences and humanities seamless access to a full and unified digital panorama of relevant data and services, tools and training required to make optimal use of data.
SSHOC leveraged and interconnected existing and new infrastructures from the SSH ERICs and other international SSH data infrastructures to foster synergies across disciplines and expedite interdisciplinary research and collaboration.
In 40 months it addressed SSH-specific challenges such as the distributed character of data infrastructures, multi-linguality, data complexity, secure access to sensitive data and others. Among tangible outcomes of the project are the curated collection of tools, services and data repositories. These are made discoverable through the SSH Open Marketplace. Whenever relevant for other disciplines, they were also registered and discoverable in the EOSC catalogue.
Users of SSHOC span scholars from the broader SSH domain, data producers and users, open-source communities, and industry players. To ensure success, and commitment and maximise its impact, SSHOC strived to engage its stakeholders and raise awareness about the added value of its assets for their day-to-day research work.
The community activated by SSHOC will keep expanding and aims to be the reference point in Europe for SSH research resources long after the project end. It will continue its activities under the umbrella of the “Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cluster”, guided by a co-signed Memorandum of Agreement.
SSHOC leveraged and interconnected existing and new infrastructures from the SSH ERICs and other international SSH data infrastructures to foster synergies across disciplines and expedite interdisciplinary research and collaboration.
In 40 months it addressed SSH-specific challenges such as the distributed character of data infrastructures, multi-linguality, data complexity, secure access to sensitive data and others. Among tangible outcomes of the project are the curated collection of tools, services and data repositories. These are made discoverable through the SSH Open Marketplace. Whenever relevant for other disciplines, they were also registered and discoverable in the EOSC catalogue.
Users of SSHOC span scholars from the broader SSH domain, data producers and users, open-source communities, and industry players. To ensure success, and commitment and maximise its impact, SSHOC strived to engage its stakeholders and raise awareness about the added value of its assets for their day-to-day research work.
The community activated by SSHOC will keep expanding and aims to be the reference point in Europe for SSH research resources long after the project end. It will continue its activities under the umbrella of the “Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cluster”, guided by a co-signed Memorandum of Agreement.
The SSHOC thematic cluster project has built a strong and recognisable brand while actively breaking down the disciplinary silos through the sharing of knowledge, tools and services with significant potential for further capacity-building as an important building block for EOSC.
The project has ensured impactful outreach and stakeholder engagement and has promoted and supported the organisation of EU-wide dissemination awareness-raising and training events. The Consortium organised 2 conferences, 63 workshops, 54 training events, 7 communication campaigns, had 148 videos produced, and had 33 factsheets and 26 success stories published. Through a solid and continued outreach programme, it has engaged over 8000 stakeholders in 100+ events organised, with a social media community of 2400+ members, and 490 newsletter subscribers. Despite pandemic limitations, it succeeded in engaging stakeholders in the development of services, as well as raising awareness for tools and services.
A further avenue for end-user engagement has been the establishment of dedicated (online) communities to serve researchers in specific disciplines or tasks or involve them in achieving particular objectives tied to project outputs. It established the SSHOC training community (172 members), the SSH trainers directory, the SSH Open Marketplace tester community (106 members), the SSHOC Trust Support Community, and set grounds for a SSH Dataverse Community, and Secure Data Facility Professionals Network. All the resources have been made as FAIR as possible, available, project results published in Zenodo, and stored in different appropriate repositories. At the end of the project SSHOC Zenodo community counts 260+ records, which have been downloaded 22K+ times and viewed 29K+ times.
On Governance and Sustainability arena, work was done to support the transition of the diverse SSHOC community into a collaborative consortium with a service offer that is interoperable with EOSC to a high level, covering core issues of governance of the SSH Cloud from different perspectives, including implementation of the FAIR principles and ethical issues related to the wide adoption of an open access culture, sustainability, cross-cluster coordination and cooperation on data-driven SSH topics. Project focused on the integration of lifting technologies and services into the SSH Cloud, testing machine translation for vocabularies, data format conversion, data-citation and the development of tool for matching data and analysis services, innovations in the data production, new tools for managing SSH data and also explored innovative ways to create data, upgraded software solutions for storing data, finalised the investigation on GDPR impact on EOSC and prepared guidelines for a SSH GDPR Code of Conduct, and established technical prerequisites for remote and secure data access.
The project’s main product, SSH Open Marketplace, was successfully built as a discovery portal that pools and contextualises resources for Social Sciences and Humanities research communities: tools, services, training materials, datasets, publications and workflows. It highlights solutions and research practices for every step of the SSH research data life cycle. Based on the eleven sources ingested in the SSH Open Marketplace and on individual creation of content, 1714 tools, 342 Training Materials, 2953 Publications, 310 Datasets and 27 workflows are available in the SSH Open Marketplace at the end of the project.
The project has ensured impactful outreach and stakeholder engagement and has promoted and supported the organisation of EU-wide dissemination awareness-raising and training events. The Consortium organised 2 conferences, 63 workshops, 54 training events, 7 communication campaigns, had 148 videos produced, and had 33 factsheets and 26 success stories published. Through a solid and continued outreach programme, it has engaged over 8000 stakeholders in 100+ events organised, with a social media community of 2400+ members, and 490 newsletter subscribers. Despite pandemic limitations, it succeeded in engaging stakeholders in the development of services, as well as raising awareness for tools and services.
A further avenue for end-user engagement has been the establishment of dedicated (online) communities to serve researchers in specific disciplines or tasks or involve them in achieving particular objectives tied to project outputs. It established the SSHOC training community (172 members), the SSH trainers directory, the SSH Open Marketplace tester community (106 members), the SSHOC Trust Support Community, and set grounds for a SSH Dataverse Community, and Secure Data Facility Professionals Network. All the resources have been made as FAIR as possible, available, project results published in Zenodo, and stored in different appropriate repositories. At the end of the project SSHOC Zenodo community counts 260+ records, which have been downloaded 22K+ times and viewed 29K+ times.
On Governance and Sustainability arena, work was done to support the transition of the diverse SSHOC community into a collaborative consortium with a service offer that is interoperable with EOSC to a high level, covering core issues of governance of the SSH Cloud from different perspectives, including implementation of the FAIR principles and ethical issues related to the wide adoption of an open access culture, sustainability, cross-cluster coordination and cooperation on data-driven SSH topics. Project focused on the integration of lifting technologies and services into the SSH Cloud, testing machine translation for vocabularies, data format conversion, data-citation and the development of tool for matching data and analysis services, innovations in the data production, new tools for managing SSH data and also explored innovative ways to create data, upgraded software solutions for storing data, finalised the investigation on GDPR impact on EOSC and prepared guidelines for a SSH GDPR Code of Conduct, and established technical prerequisites for remote and secure data access.
The project’s main product, SSH Open Marketplace, was successfully built as a discovery portal that pools and contextualises resources for Social Sciences and Humanities research communities: tools, services, training materials, datasets, publications and workflows. It highlights solutions and research practices for every step of the SSH research data life cycle. Based on the eleven sources ingested in the SSH Open Marketplace and on individual creation of content, 1714 tools, 342 Training Materials, 2953 Publications, 310 Datasets and 27 workflows are available in the SSH Open Marketplace at the end of the project.
The consortium is transforming the SSHOC project branding into sustainable branding for all Key Exploitable Results, leveraging on the strong visual identity of the project and keeping the door open for new communities to join “the SSH Open Cluster”. Efforts around building this identity resulted in the preparation of a Memorandum of Understanding between the SSHOC partners, which will ensure the post-project collaboration and sustainability of results. A number of expected developments will allow existing and new data users to be the main beneficiaries of the upgraded data management and dissemination tools.
The SSH Open Marketplace promotes use and sustainability of the tools and services and other resources, including workflows and training materials referenced and showcased in the catalogue. As a discovery portal, aggregator of third-party sources and an access point to SSH resources, the SSH Open Marketplace is a direct contribution to the EOSC ecosystem and the SSH Cloud.
It will prioritise its position on EOSC service catalogue onboarding, finalise tools and services being developed, as well as continue onboarding FAIR tools and services to EOSC. Distributing information on the SSHOC Marketplace curation process to interdisciplinary data communities is a priority, thus allowing the use and improvement of their data practises. SSHOC published all data results according to FAIR principles and a FAIR SSH citation prototype will allow gathering standardised information about datasets from different sources, giving visibility to both research products (datasets) and repositories, eventually enhancing their FAIRness.
Datasets linked to training materials, tools, and workflows were enhanced, increasing their accessibility, interoperability, and reuse. SSHOC provided recommendations for sustainably maintaining trust across the SSH ERICs beyond the lifetime of the project. The activities of promoting data stewardship and active inclusion of data stewards will continue.
Strategic coordination meetings between cluster projects initiated by SSHOC will continue. This collaboration has already supported and provided advice and input into updates of SRIA, HE23-34 Programme, and a number of joint position papers.
The SSH Open Marketplace promotes use and sustainability of the tools and services and other resources, including workflows and training materials referenced and showcased in the catalogue. As a discovery portal, aggregator of third-party sources and an access point to SSH resources, the SSH Open Marketplace is a direct contribution to the EOSC ecosystem and the SSH Cloud.
It will prioritise its position on EOSC service catalogue onboarding, finalise tools and services being developed, as well as continue onboarding FAIR tools and services to EOSC. Distributing information on the SSHOC Marketplace curation process to interdisciplinary data communities is a priority, thus allowing the use and improvement of their data practises. SSHOC published all data results according to FAIR principles and a FAIR SSH citation prototype will allow gathering standardised information about datasets from different sources, giving visibility to both research products (datasets) and repositories, eventually enhancing their FAIRness.
Datasets linked to training materials, tools, and workflows were enhanced, increasing their accessibility, interoperability, and reuse. SSHOC provided recommendations for sustainably maintaining trust across the SSH ERICs beyond the lifetime of the project. The activities of promoting data stewardship and active inclusion of data stewards will continue.
Strategic coordination meetings between cluster projects initiated by SSHOC will continue. This collaboration has already supported and provided advice and input into updates of SRIA, HE23-34 Programme, and a number of joint position papers.