On 22 November, the General Assembly of CESSDA ERIC approved the membership of two new countries at its second meeting in Vienna.

"CESSDA ERIC is delighted to welcome two new members, Finland and Portugal. We look forward to working closely together over the coming months and years”, stated Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA.

"It is a crucial time for CESSDA. In June this year we were granted the status of European Research Infrastructure Consortium and we now have seventeen countries joining forces to advance the social sciences in Europe. We are on track to reach full European coverage and together, we can ensure that CESSDA's newly-established strategic objectives on trust, training, technology, tools and services are met", Ron Dekker added.

"I’m very pleased that Finland is once again an official member of CESSDA and that FSD remains a member of the family of European data archives. I was certain that the General Assembly would approve the membership application because FSD personnel have important roles in so many CESSDA projects", stated Helena Laaksonen, Director of FSD.

“The Portuguese Social Information Archive (APIS) has been developing a partnership with CESSDA over the last few years. We are now looking forward to working more closely within CESSDA on the open science agenda and taking part in all of its activities”, stated Pedro Moura Ferreira, auxiliary investigator at ICS and representative for Portugal at the General Assembly.

APIS is based at the Institute of Social Sciences (Instituto de Ciências Sociais - ICS) in Lisbon, which hosted the third CESSDA SaW collaborative workshop on “Widening the European infrastructures for social science data archives” on 3-4 May 2017.

More information:

• Finland becomes a member of CESSDA ERIC
• APIS website in English