The CESSDA Strengthening and Widening workshop kicks off today (5 June) in Milan, Italy. The event runs over two days and aims to present CESSDA’s growing assets and services to potential new member countries.

As of today, sixteen countries are members of CESSDA ERIC, one country is an observer, and several others are already on their way to membership.

“CESSDA has achieved a great deal over the last few years, with numerous ongoing joint activities with CESSDA service providers working closely together towards common goals. Dedicated working groups deliver regular results in a variety of areas of relevance to all involved, such as trust, training and technology in data management and preservation. Tools and services are being rolled out that address key issues of CESSDA: trust, transparency, knowledge exchange and FAIR data," stated Ivana Ilijašić Veršić, COO of CESSDA ERIC.

With its distributed, sustainable and trusted platform, CESSDA can offer researchers a comprehensive set of tools and services to curate, publish and re-use research data. In recognising the central role of the human factor, CESSDA also offers a wide range of expert training guides for researchers, covering the whole research life cycle.

Current widening activities will be presented and a panel discussion will address experiences from three potential member countries, Macedonia, Serbia and Ukraine. Participants will also find out about the upcoming CESSDA help desk and mentorship programme, aimed at interested non-member countries.

The event is a unique opportunity to take stock of some critical topics. Attendees from national ministries, research councils and data service providers will learn about social science research infrastructures in Italy, how to develop sustainable research infrastructures from the perspective of ESFRI¹ as well as the particular case of CESSDA, and not least, a recent proposal by all social sciences and humanities ESFRI ERICs to form a social sciences and humanities data platform, the SSH Cloud.

“The SSH Cloud will allow European researchers and other data users in the social sciences and humanities to effectively manage and access data, tools and training. It will contribute to the open science agenda and to the European Open Science Cloud, while ensuring multidisciplinary collaboration,” stated Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA ERIC.

Also addressed during the workshop are CESSDA Training activities on sharing and reusing research and the CESSDA Data Catalogue to be released this summer. In addition, two round table discussions will take place on how to successfully develop national data archive services and on trust in the CESSDA context and the CoreTrustSeal.

Background:

The “Strengthening and Widening of the European infrastructure of social science data archives” workshop is organised by CESSDA in collaboration with the Interdepartmental Centre UniData – Bicocca Archive and addresses the results, services and future vision of CESSDA. It is specifically tailored to representatives from ministries, research councils and service providers of potential new member countries, with the aim of demonstrating the added value and the benefits of joining the CESSDA community.

Find out more: https://www.cessda.eu/widening2018/

Contact CESSDA (cessda@cessda.eu) to get involved.

¹ European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (www.esfri.eu)