The SSHOC thematic cluster project has built a strong and recognisable brand while actively breaking down the disciplinary silos through the sharing of knowledge, tools and services with significant potential for further capacity-building as an important building block for EOSC.
The project has ensured impactful outreach and stakeholder engagement and has promoted and supported the organisation of EU-wide dissemination awareness-raising and training events. The Consortium organised 2 conferences, 63 workshops, 54 training events, 7 communication campaigns, had 148 videos produced, and had 33 factsheets and 26 success stories published. Through a solid and continued outreach programme, it has engaged over 8000 stakeholders in 100+ events organised, with a social media community of 2400+ members, and 490 newsletter subscribers. Despite pandemic limitations, it succeeded in engaging stakeholders in the development of services, as well as raising awareness for tools and services.
A further avenue for end-user engagement has been the establishment of dedicated (online) communities to serve researchers in specific disciplines or tasks or involve them in achieving particular objectives tied to project outputs. It established the SSHOC training community (172 members), the SSH trainers directory, the SSH Open Marketplace tester community (106 members), the SSHOC Trust Support Community, and set grounds for a SSH Dataverse Community, and Secure Data Facility Professionals Network. All the resources have been made as FAIR as possible, available, project results published in Zenodo, and stored in different appropriate repositories. At the end of the project SSHOC Zenodo community counts 260+ records, which have been downloaded 22K+ times and viewed 29K+ times.
On Governance and Sustainability arena, work was done to support the transition of the diverse SSHOC community into a collaborative consortium with a service offer that is interoperable with EOSC to a high level, covering core issues of governance of the SSH Cloud from different perspectives, including implementation of the FAIR principles and ethical issues related to the wide adoption of an open access culture, sustainability, cross-cluster coordination and cooperation on data-driven SSH topics. Project focused on the integration of lifting technologies and services into the SSH Cloud, testing machine translation for vocabularies, data format conversion, data-citation and the development of tool for matching data and analysis services, innovations in the data production, new tools for managing SSH data and also explored innovative ways to create data, upgraded software solutions for storing data, finalised the investigation on GDPR impact on EOSC and prepared guidelines for a SSH GDPR Code of Conduct, and established technical prerequisites for remote and secure data access.
The project’s main product, SSH Open Marketplace, was successfully built as a discovery portal that pools and contextualises resources for Social Sciences and Humanities research communities: tools, services, training materials, datasets, publications and workflows. It highlights solutions and research practices for every step of the SSH research data life cycle. Based on the eleven sources ingested in the SSH Open Marketplace and on individual creation of content, 1714 tools, 342 Training Materials, 2953 Publications, 310 Datasets and 27 workflows are available in the SSH Open Marketplace at the end of the project.
