The Social Sciences & Humanities (SSH) landscape covers a wide range of academic disciplines, which help us to understand ourselves, others, and the human societies around us. These disciplines can be grouped in the following main areas ERC panel structure (2024) 
https://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2023-03/ERC_panel_structure_2024_calls.pdf: Individuals, Markets and Organisations, Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems, the Social World and its Interactions, the Human Mind and its Complexity, Texts and Concepts, the Study of the Human Past, Human Mobility, Environment, and Space, Studies of Cultures and Arts.

 

Moreover, SSH contributes to multidisciplinary research, inter alia in the field of Health, Security, Urban Studies, Science and Technology Studies.

The Domain of Social and Cultural Innovation (SCI) in the ESFRI Landscape includes all those infrastructures projects and European Research Infrastructures legal entities (ERICs) that support our understanding of people and society and the research in the disciplines under the acronym of SSH. Given this acronym is used outside of ESFRI, it should again be used instead of SCI.

SSH disciplines address the digitalisation paradigm by exploiting and adopting new methods, data types, and tools. Human behaviour and its consequences are complex, and affect how culture is generated and shared, how society is organised, and how technology and policies should be developed and implemented. Understanding the mechanisms behind these processes requires Research Infrastructures (RIs) that enable the cross-disciplinary study of development over time, locations, and interlinkages. It requires facilities capable of dealing with the growing amounts of complex, multi-layered data, which needs proper contextualisation and evaluation. The recent diffusion of systems, which generate information on the basis of Large Language Models (LLM), has added the need for evaluating the generated 'knowledge' and account for the impact of these systems on societies.

SSH is at the forefront of establishing RIs that efficiently implement sharing of FAIR data resources FAIR data principles are a central concept of Open Science. Their implementation means making the data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. See, e.g., GO-FAIR initiative 
https://www.go-fair.org/ as a core driver for research development. At the same time this data driven SSH research creates a vital platform for development of fair social policies in Europe to advance citizens’ wellbeing, welfare, and cultural dialogue. Moreover, SSH researchers address the various societal challenges in the forms of transformations, crises, and divides. In this line, the SSH provide underpinning research for the European pillar of social rights and European policies enabling an understanding of local, national, and supra national realities. Even though most of the SSH RIs primarily address researchers supporting the highest standards of research quality, they also serve policy makers and the public at large.

RIs are long-term enterprises and represent strategic investments, which are indispensable for enabling and developing research. In addition to fostering scientific knowledge for the benefit of SSH researchers, they also impact the research environment socially and economically. The Council’s conclusions on RIs in December 2022 recognised RIs’ central role in the development of the European Research Area (ERA). Council of the European Union (2022), Council Conclusions on Research Infrastructures
https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-15429-2022-INIT/en/pdf 

Data analysis on social transformation provides crucial insight into people’s capacity to adapt to fast environmental and technological changes. The Council’s 2022 conclusions affirm that RIs “provide knowledge-based solutions to societal challenges and help to deliver the EU’s green and digital transitions”. Finally, SSH RIs support the preservation and reuse of cultural data which are essential to understand the development and variety of cultures, and consequently to the resilience of Europe as a project of Member States (MS), alongside the creation of economic value in multiple industries, spanning from the creative arts to tourism.

Providing an in-depth understanding of the social and human dimension, the contribution of SSH RIs to different challenges, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and policy making in general, is more visible than ever before. At the core of these research domains lies the understanding of societal upheavals and changes and cultural transitions; it involves engaging citizens to modify behaviour to help alleviate the consequences of climate, societal and technological changes, exploring political debates in different languages, and understanding the impact of events such as wars, migration, and pandemics on people’s wellbeing and health. Complementary to the approaches of the natural and physical sciences, SSH research provides methods, pre-requisites, sources, tools, and evidence to improve our societies’ well-being and resilience. This research does not solely focus on behavioural change or social acceptance of the future; it also yields hard data and solutions that support policies and programmes, catering to the needs and desires of citizens. 

SSH RIs support research that significantly contributes to European scientific excellence. A recent EC publication claims that Humanities is a focus of expertise in Europe and SSH research plays a crucial role in scientific competitiveness. Focusing on Europe, the US National Science Foundation’s report on publications (2022) claims that the European authored Social Sciences publications are 17% of world share versus the 8.4% in the US. NSF Science and Engineering indicators 2022 
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20214/publication-output-by-country-region-or-economy-and-scientific-field#; Gingras Y. and Mosbah-Natanso S. (2010), “Where are Social Sciences produced?”, World Social Science Report, Chapter 4, p. 150. Furthermore, the most recent report by the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) shows that the global share of SSH publishing in 2020 was $4.5 billion, and Europe benefits by 32% of total value (US 40%, Asia 20%). STM Global Brief 2021 – Economics and Market Size
https://www.stmassoc.org/2022_08_24_STM_White_Report_a4_v15.pdf, pp. 10-12

SSH RIs identify important themes for European research, contributing towards scientific excellence in these domains. They support the creation, collection, and curation of essential data to support disciplinary areas in exploring new approaches to fundamental questions. SSH RIs also play a key role in the innovation of methods and research processes both at disciplinary and interdisciplinary levels. RIs in this domain also draw in non-academic actors who accelerate the realisation of the benefits of research for society. These RIs are ideally positioned to support current research and nurture the next generation of scientists across Europe using resources from SSH data archives to cross-national surveys along with new methods and processes. In some areas, SSH RIs are at the forefront of current developments, as relevant practices have been established for a long time; for instance, sharing data for the purpose of historical comparison between cultures and countries and study of trends in social developments.

Furthermore, working with experts from other domains encourages collaboration and exchanging best practices. RIs may also assist the coordination within or between disciplines and support research with provision of tools. More importantly, they consider the FAIR principles and encourage the use of standards in data collections. Namely, RIs can help ensure that researchers have the options for re-use of existing data before creating new datasets; where possible, new data are designed to be interoperable with existing high-quality, comparable data, creating new knowledge. RIs deliver more than access to data, they facilitate shared data collection on a grand scale and provide access to expertise and guidance to researchers early in the design phase of new research.

The first five large SSH ERICs (CESSDA ERIC, CLARIN ERIC, DARIAH ERIC, ESS ERIC and SHARE ERIC) were included in the ESFRI roadmap in 2006 and awarded Landmark status in 2016; some of them built upon collaborations started decades earlier. Two more (E-RIHS, EHRI) were added in 2018, followed by another four that joined in 2021 (GGP, GUIDE, OPERAS and RESILIENCE).

The current SSH RIs are displayed in Figure 1 and Figure 2 and are summarised below, following a thematic division and with the Landmarks (ERICs) first, followed by the Projects (in alphabetical order).

  

   

 

 

Social Sciences – SURVEYS, DATA TOOLS AND SERVICES

The ESFRI Landmark ESS ERIC (European Social Survey) ESS ERIC
https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/ is an academically driven long-term cross-national survey in Social Sciences that has been conducted across Europe since 2001. It assesses the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviour patterns of diverse populations in more than 30 nations, measuring change over time within and between European countries in their living conditions, social structure, public opinion, and attitudes.

The ESFRI Landmark SHARE ERIC (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe) SHARE ERIC
https://share-eric.eu/ is a Research Infrastructure for studying health, social, economic, and environmental questions over the life-course of European citizens and beyond. SHARE collects multidisciplinary and cross-national survey panel data on health, socio-economic status and social and family networks of individuals aged 50 or older (biennial survey waves). 

The ESFRI Project GUIDE (Growing Up in Digital Europe) GUIDE
https://www.guidecohort.eu/ is a pan-European comparative birth cohort survey including a sample of newborn infants and a sample of school age children. Both cohorts are surveyed using a common questionnaire and data collection methodology at regular intervals until the age of 24. The Research Infrastructure is a source of high quality longitudinal statistical evidence to support the development of social policies to enhance the well-being of children, young people, and their families across Europe. 

The ESFRI Project GGP (Generations and Gender Programme) GGP
https://www.ggp-i.org/ provides scientists and policy makers with high-quality and timely data about families and life course trajectories of individuals to enable researchers to contribute insights and answers to current societal and public policy challenges. GGP survey focuses on inter-generational and gender relations between people, expressed in care arrangements and the organisation of paid and unpaid work. 

The ESFRI Landmark CESSDA ERIC (Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives) CESSDA
https://www.cessda.eu/ provides large-scale, integrated, and sustainable data services to the Social Sciences. It brings together Social Sciences data archives across Europe, aiming at promoting the results of Social Science research and supporting national and international research and cooperation. CESSDA provides a central data catalogue and a platform to jointly develop user-friendly tools and services.

 

HUMANITIES – SURVEYS, DATA TOOLS AND SERVICES

The ESFRI Landmark CLARIN ERIC (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) CLARIN
https://www.clarin.eu/ provides data, tools, and services to support research based on language resources, and it is available to all disciplines and not exclusively to SSH. CLARIN’s Virtual Language Observatory (VLO) provides easy and sustainable access to digital language data and advanced tools to discover, explore, exploit, annotate, analyse, or combine them, wherever they are located.

The ESFRI Landmark DARIAH ERIC (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) DARIAH ERIC
https://www.dariah.eu/ provides support to digitally enabled research and teaching across the Arts and Humanities. DARIAH is a network of people, expertise, information, content, methods, tools, and technologies. It develops, maintains, and operates an infrastructure in support of digital research practices and sustains researchers in using them to build, analyse and interpret digital resources. 

CLARIN ERIC and DARIAH ERIC jointly manage the Digital Humanities Course Registry Digital Humanities Course Registry
https://dhcr.clarin-dariah.eu/ and in some countries, they have joined their efforts.

The ESFRI Project EHRI (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure) EHRI
https://www.ehri-project.eu/ enables online and physical access to Holocaust sources and expertise dispersed across many institutions in Europe and beyond. EHRI provides innovative tools and training that advance the digital transformation of Holocaust research, remembrance, and education. The vision of EHRI is to secure seamless access to all sources and expertise that are relevant to the study of the Holocaust.

The ESFRI Project E-RIHS (European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science) E-RIHS
https://www.e-rihs.eu/ is dedicated to heritage science, an interdisciplinary domain merging STEM and SSH to enhance knowledge, conservation, and appreciation of cultural heritage. E-RIHS aims to preserve heritage’s accessibility and significance in a changing world by unravelling its cultural and historical layers, understanding material change, and utilising it for socioeconomic and environmental sustainability.

The ESFRI Project RESILIENCE (REligious Studies Infrastructure: tooLs, Innovation, Experts, conNections and Centres in Europe) RESILIENCE
https://www.resilience-ri.eu/ focuses on Religious Studies, building a high-performance platform, supplying tools and access to physical and digital data to scholars from all scientific disciplines. RESILIENCE primarily serves the academic community, but its impact extends to the non-academic community. It gives physical and digital access to major relevant data archives for Religious Studies.

Open scholarly communication of Social Sciences & Humanities in the ERA is supported by the ESFRI Project OPERAS (OPen scholarly communication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities). OPERAS
https://operas-eu.org/ Its mission is to coordinate and federate resources in Europe to efficiently address the scholarly communication needs of European researchers in the field of SSH. OPERAS fills a gap in the European landscape, between generic e-infrastructures and RIs dedicated to research data in specific disciplines or topics.