SSH RIs in Switzerland

Introduction

In spring 2022, a coordination group consisting of the directors of national research infrastructures (RIs) in the SSH, the national coordinators of international SSH RIs with Swiss participation (CESSDA, CLARIN, DARIAH, ESS, SHARE, GGP) and the representatives of the Swiss Academy for the SSH was created.

Activities

This working group has started a reflexion in order gather the SSH community and to defend its interests with respect to RIs. This is being done through a series of events and a position paper, as follows:

1. The first event, which took place on Mai 31, 2022, gathered several stakeholders - researchers, representatives of academic and research institutions, the SNSF, SERI and Euresearch.

2. The position paper was written in spring 2022 and circulated in the SSH community to collect for support signatures in August 2022.

3. The second event, which took place on 18 January 2023, had the theme "Paving the way for the future". It aimed at learning about concrete infrastructure proposals and exchanging on how we can coordinate within the Swiss SSH community to create synergies between different concrete projects. Concretely, this meeting had three main objectives.

Raise awareness on the importance of research infrastructure in the SSH domain and how prioritisation and funding works (national and ESFRI roadmap process)
Share experiences from other countries and the European level on how collaborations between projects and infrastructures work
Give a platform to potential new Swiss RIs in the SSH domain in order to reflect on needs of the SSH community and how to create synergies and join forces

4. Following the example of the European SSHOC project (2019-2022) and of the recently granted Dutch SSHOC-NL project, the idea of moving towards a SSHOC-CH national organisation was put forward. SSHOC-CH is aimed as a national collaboration between social sciences and humanities in order to implement a SSHOC-CH consortium of research infrastructures and of higher education institutions. Such a SSHOC-CH organization is necessary in order to facilitate the access of the SSH fields and its sub-fields to a satisfactory national ecosystem of services, data and tools in the future years. With this vision, a kick-off meeting took place in autumn 2023, which gathered members from the scientific community, national RIs providing services for the Swiss SSH scientific community, and from the national nodes of European SSH RIs who are interested in supporting and getting involved in this project.

5. Following the meeting that took place in autumn 2023, where all stakeholders supported the creation of the SSHOC-CH Association, we take the necessary steps to move forward. A half-day workshop on the need and the future of infrastructures for the social sciences and humanities community in Switzerland was held on April 24, 2024 in Bern. With this ocassion, the SSHOC-CH was founded and the SSHOC-CH cluster was officially launched. The SSHOC-CH Coordination Group consists of Georg Lutz (FORS), Cristina Grisot (CLARIN-CH & DARIAH-CH), Stefanie Steinmetz (GGP, UNIL), Noah Bubenhofer (LiRI, UZH) and Sacha Zala (Dodis).

With the creation of the SSHOC-CH cluster, the initiative "RIs in Switzerland" will have reached its goal and will continue its existence under the umbrella of the SSHOC-CH cluster.

Read more about SSHOC-CH and join the SSHOC-CH Association here.

Updated on April 23, 2024