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. You can find here the slides of the meeting.

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

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.

To reach these objectives, we welcomed four invited speakers from abroad, who shared their experience of how collaboration and clustering happened successfully in other countries and at the European level. In addition, the floor was given to several Swiss projects of RIs in the SSH field with the aim to reflect on user needs and possible synergies. The day ended with a Round Table with an open discussion, in which invited guests from the SNSF, the SERI, swissuniversities, the SAGW and all members of the audience will have the opportunity to express themselves. Have a look at the Programme, Franciska de Jong's slides, Matej Ďurčo's slides and Tom Emery's slides.

! NEW !

4. Following the example of the European SSHOC project (2019-2022) and of the recently granted Dutch SSHOC-NL project, we put forward the idea of moving towards a SSHOC-CH national organisation. 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. Nevertheless, the success of such a national enterprise depends on the cooperation among the members of the Swiss SSH scientific and infrastructural community, as it was highlighted in the position paper and proved successful in the case of SSHOC-NL (read here the project application).

With this vision, we will have a kick-off meeting in autumn 2023, which will gather 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. The purpose of the meeting is to address and discuss questions such as,

Concretely, what would a SSHOC-CH organization look like?

How could it function and with what governance model?

What synergies should be made?

What financial plan to fund SSHOC-CH?

How will it fit into the curent national strategic ecosystem, i.e. the Roadmap process, the Open Research Data Strategy and the Strategy Council?

How to manage nationally a large array of federated services relevant for the entire SSH field?

Contact

For more information about the initiative and how to get involved, please write to Dr. Cristina Grisot, DARIAH-CH National Coordination Officer and CLARIN-CH Scientific Coordinator or Prof. Dr. Georg Lutz, director of FORS - Swiss Center of Expertise in the Social Sciences.