RIs in the SSH domain are evolving in a fast-changing context, where the impact of technology has major effects. Europe is a knowledge society. Within a generation, more than half of the European population will have completed a tertiary level education, and the number will continue growing. Knowledge is no longer the driver of the economy alone; it will also shape social and political processes in Europe and allow citizens to be more informed. Digital technologies change the way research is done across all scientific fields, and the greatest change might be seen in SSH.

Increasingly, data relevant for research comes from multiple sources, such as administrative documents, statistical collections, businesses, electronic devices, online transactions, social media. The competitiveness of the ERA might hinge upon the ability to harness and integrate this data alongside data generated by researchers more than ever before. However, these types of data present many challenges. They often align less with FAIR principles than traditional research data. The existence of specific collections might be obscured, accessibility issues arise due to commercial interests, data protection or copyright concerns. Data is often not well-documented, and there might be a lack of standards facilitating its interoperability.

While it might be impossible to freely disseminate all data types, it is still important to secure their access to researchers. This holds not only for data from public organisations, like statistical offices or public administrations, but also for data from the private sector including publishers, especially when there is a significant public interest at stake. In these cases, making data available may be an obligation, as outlined in the European Data Act. Unlike industrial data, data within SSH RIs is in most cases free and open, with some exceptions regarding access to cultural heritage data.

The evolution of AI, with for instance its generative systems based on Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT, is determining a paradigm change, and access to high performance computing is required to researchers and students. Moreover, the evaluation of the results generated by LLM, including ethical aspects, is an important future task to be addressed by SSH RIs. Not only digitalisations have changed the scale of the results, but they have also transformed methodologies and training of all scholars. Among the actors of this transformations are new forms of data and data analytics, the use of MRI for behavioural studies, satellites used
to map and measure economic growth, laser scanner data from archaeology and art. Just like any field, researchers in the Social Sciences & Humanities domain find innovative tools to conduct research, of which many are new and expensive.

RIs like CLARIN ERIC and DARIAH ERIC must reflect on their distinctive role in this process. They must engage further showing their capacities, distinctiveness, and unique role under the light of these new developments.

Developing and enhancing the usage and impact of data about societies in Europe from various sources should be a priority. Vast amounts of scientific data about our European societies are being archived and distributed in data repositories within the network of CESSDA ERIC and have a large potential. Legislative reforms like the Data Governance Act (DGA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA), enabling better data access for research, should be brought to their full potential by supporting research endeavours that build on analysing large data sets. The DGA invites Member States to establish safe and secure platforms to give researchers access to data that originally stems from administrative acts. Legal and administrative obstacles that still hinder sharing of, for instance, administrative data for research should be removed also at the national level. The technological means for storing and sharing such data in an ethically responsible way are already in place.
More and more MS are using these new possibilities. The DSA enables access to large commercial platforms, giving access to social media data for research from Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs). 

More established data assets are produced and distributed by National Statistical Institutes and Eurostat within the framework of the European Statistical System (ESS). There is large capacity to enhance their impact for research. The interplay between academic research and NSIs has untapped potential that could be brought to use to gain new knowledge about climate behaviour, mobility and economic questions. Furthermore, the major innovation in public policy over the next 10 years will be the personalisation of public services, from health to education. People will rely on new knowledge to help guide and inform their decisions and choices throughout their life from birth, through their working life and on into retirement. The issues that concern and challenge EU citizens the most are largely ‘social’.

Green and Digital transitions are strong European priorities and they have become the lens to look at European policies for the future. SSH RIs are moving towards focusing on the twin transition. In relation to federated and connected databases, it will be possible to understand the impact of the twin transition in a more geographically focused way – local and regional – in addition to national and European. Large cities and small communities are impacted differently and respond in dissimilar ways to the transformation implied by the digital and green transitions. Locally held social data can offer key insights about how to adapt to European diversity, especially in crucial areas such as labour relations and labour markets, market behaviour and social standards. Social policy could benefit greatly from a better understanding of a diverse European society with locally sourced data augmenting the larger national and pan-European datasets.
It is therefore key to explore trends for this domain in the significant investments made in large-scale Research and Innovation (R&I) projects through the EU Framework programmes and with attention to multidisciplinary approaches.

SSH research started to be funded under the 4th Framework Programme with a limited amount and a small number of projects. In Horizon Europe, the cluster dedicated to SSH research became far more relevant. For instance, Horizon 2020 funded projects around Migration and Democracy (under the Governance topics), many of which had significant data collections and analysis components. A summary report on migration studies WP10 — Deliverable 10.2 Strategic Research Agenda on Migration. Proposal number: GA 7701121, Horizon 2020: Call: H2020-SC6-REV-INEQUAL-2016-2017 identified that the resources collected could lead to an important cluster of data for emerging infrastructures in support of population studies, mobility and, above all, migration flows.

Similarly, Horizon Europe devotes special attention to the intervention area of democracy. One important field of application will be research on our European democracies, which are the cornerstones upon which the European Union is built. Since their establishment, European democracies have faced challenges due to societal developments, and they will most likely continue to do so in the future, being confronted with climate change, energy supply, novel technologies, and the like. Thus, to strengthen the resilience of European democracies and render them fit for the future, it will be crucial and inevitable to monitor how they navigate these challenges.

Democracy research is, as of now, very fragmented. It is in fact characterised by many separate data collections spread across prominent research institutions all over Europe, each one employing different data collection methods, coding practices, and archival standards. This currently impedes a comprehensive and efficient analysis of democracy research data. The role of SSH RIs in the standardisation and harmonisation of different data objects in order to make them interoperable and linkable, and to a greater extent reusable, is therefore central to ERA.

Evolving RIs like Monitoring Electoral Democracy (MEDem) or projects like Reconstructing Democracy in Times of Crisis, A Voter-Centred Perspective (REDEM) provide data that will enable better, more comprehensive, and highly innovative comparative research on electoral democracies and electoral systems. 

The research community encouraged participation in large consortia and inter- and multidisciplinary approaches in large-scale projects. Over time, cross national collaboration has also increased the presence and, only to some extent, funding for SSH and a better visibility of its research results at both European and National levels. Horizon Europe surpasses Horizon 2020 as for Cluster 2, a dedicated SSH research-driven cluster focusing on three intervention areas: democracy, cultural heritage, and social transformation. The programme also includes Humanities and Social Sciences as a cross item element, and a collaboration to be taken into account in a number of flagged topics across different clusters. The Missions launched in Horizon Europe are another example of how crucial it is to align national and European efforts for wider and more ambitious achievements in science. SSH sector data could be particularly important for addressing these missions as they can lead to Data Spaces combining academic, governmental, administrative and company data. SSH RIs are actively participating in data space initiatives including cultural heritage, language and skills. Furthermore, a strong collaboration between SSH RIs and the emerging European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) will be crucial.

More trends can be identified in other areas of development. In the area of language, both spoken and written, commercial actors are developing platforms and services at an unprecedented speed. Translation tools such as dictionaries (e.g., dict.leo.org), or translation machines like Google Translate or Deepl have become common tools for citizens as well as researchers. Spoken language tools and voice translations are developing at a similar pace, already offering or poised to offer spoken interpretation and translation services for many languages.

The interest of creating new infrastructures or extending the scope of existing ones lies in the fact that infrastructures, which could be created out of the Europe wide collection of smaller facilities, can easily become ‘greater than the sum of the parts’ for researchers if brought together under the coordination of a RI. For example, the number and spread of 'behavioural labs' (rather than living labs) which exist across Europe, if coordinated under a RI, could provide a significant resource to European Social and Behavioural Sciences. Research subject availability, research subject diversity, and ethics standards are all critical in appropriate subject sampling for research design innovation; at present, these and other resources remain fragmented. Structural support of such ‘core facilities’ could provide a significant boost to their sustainability.

Social and behavioural sciences miss a single point of observation about emerging large consortia and initiatives. They also miss a representation within the EIROforum, EIROforum 
https://www.eiroforum.org/about-eiroforum/ an entity that plays a crucial role in simplifying and facilitating interactions with the European Commission, the organs of the European Union, national governments, industry and so on. 

All RIs in this domain offer critical services but with different characteristics. A concentrated effort should be made to see whether services can be 'unified' at least up to a certain extent, or whether connectedness in this respect can be achieved between certain RIs. It should be noted that some efforts are being tested in this regard. 

An emerging generation of RIs is the one which combines physical labs with data analysis of tangible outputs; an exemplary case being E-RIHS.