8 http://www.lt-innovate.eu/resources/document/lt-20-13
9 Charles Beagrie Ltd and The Centre for Strategic Economic Studies (CSES) University of Victoria, Economic Impact Evaluation of the Economic and Social Data Service (March 2012)
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Political, social and cultural impact
The most obvious dimension of this impact deals with the effect of infrastructure-supported SSH research on evidence-based public policy, to which social sciences RIs have a more direct link. As an example, ESFRI Landmark
SHARE ERIC data revealed a strong correlation between early retirement and the loss of cognitive abilities both
within and between European countries. A fruitful cooperation between cognitive psychologists, gerontologists, economists, and sociologists has begun to identify the causes for this finding which range from the cognition- stimulating effect of work even if it is unpleasant to the social isolation experienced by many retirees. It sheds new light on the EU’s strive for active ageing. This finding has had strong policy implications both at European and national level. SHARE data and findings were used in the French debates on retirement age (even if in the end the decisions were taken by political arguments), and there are many similar cases of political and societal impact in other countries (e.g. Austria, Czech Republic, Italy and Germany). The EU Commission (e.g. DG ECFIN, EMPL, SANTÉ) as the single largest user of SHARE data uses the data especially for economic and social benchmarking exercises as part of the European Semester. Finally SHARE data are also used by organisations like the OECD, the WHO and the World Bank.
SSH RIs have proven directly relevant for better common understanding across Europe in many ways.
RIs like ESFRI Landmarks ESS ERIC or SHARE ERIC deal with items such as values, representations, beliefs or subjective states/conditions such as well-being that drive human behaviour and are neglected by other disciplines. However, there is no guarantee that terms such as “loyalty”, “violence”, “stress” or “fatigue” refer to the same as their direct translation, nor even that they are used in the same way among non-native English-speakers. This is the reason why a large part of the preparation of surveys in SSH is devoted to provide warrants that the interviewed people will take such words in the same meaning across Europe.
As soon as they satisfy the coverage (with respect to geography as well as languages) requirement, multi-lingual and trans-cultural RIs such as ESFRI Landmarks CLARIN ERIC and DARIAH ERIC will bring European citizens in a position to become familiar with their common cultural heritage as well as with its richness and diversity. This is key to future-oriented and sustainable development of our societies. In fact, “Cultural citizenship” is a key dimension for building and strengthening European citizenship and identity; studying, preserving and making available cultural items through the most advanced technologies is a highly relevant economic asset for European economy. Open access to historical material and heritage as well as the critical means to assess it can be considered as crucial to the development of any inclusive and reflective society. This was illustrated, for example, during the Public History of the Holocaust conference, which TextGrid and ESFRI Landmark DARIAH ERIC organised together with the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) in Berlin in 2013: such transnational Research Infrastructures are crucial for historical research, education and remembrance. Furthermore, the availability to a large audience of the 20th century philosophical corpus of Central Europe, and newspaper archives from many countries are other eloquent examples of the cultural impact of ESFRI Landmark SSH RIs.
RIs for Humanities make digitised cultural items (texts, manuscripts, paintings, 3D-reproductions of ancient monuments, etc.) and analytical tools for their interpretation available to a large audience. The knowledge and familiarity of those items contribute to hedonistic and cultural experiences that are immensely important for well- being and the accomplishment of personal capacities, as well as for cultural growth, identity and awareness of the rich cultural European tradition.
Access to multiple high quality data is essential in addressing today’s societal challenges. Working with such complex questions requires a system that is capable of giving access to and handle large amounts of data from a wide variety of data sources covering many scientific topics. The ESFRI Landmark CESSDA services and access to a large amount of social science data offer this, and the research communities will, via CESSDA’s one-stop-shop portal solution discover and provide access to these data in a far more efficient manner than today.
LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS
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Social & Cultural Innovation
SUSTAINABILITY ISSUES
Increased sustainability of the research data: all of the RIs provide archives for storing data and state-of-the-art methods to analyse and interpret them. This is an important difference to the situation 10 years ago where data could disappear when a researcher retired. Currently not only are data stored in sustainable, long-lasting and secure archives, but the current RIs (e.g. ESFRI Landmarks CLARIN ERIC and CESSDA) also use innovative methods such as Persistent Identifiers for resources and data collections, so that the same version can always be retrieved and so that research based on their data can be replicated or extended.
We also need to consider the sustainability of the RIs themselves. Research infrastructures need to be sustainable 1) financially and organisationally, 2) technically and 3) in terms of human resources.
The organisational sustainability is supported through the use of the ERIC and other legal structures. The financial sustainability of the central operations may still be an issue worth considering. For all of the SSH infrastructures the geographical coverage is crucial for the quality of the research they support and hence for the sustainability. We have a specific sub-section on geographical coverage at the end of this section.
The technical sustainability has to do with upgrading to new versions, following and updating standards, including new tools and possibilities, following international developments. All current SSH Research Infrastructures are heavily involved in and committed to the continuous technical development.
The sustainability in terms of human resources is at the heart of our infrastructures. There are 3 classes of activities where human resources are crucial:
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building and operating the infrastructure and keeping it up-to-date in the light of technological and methodologicaldevelopments and evolving user needs (this is treated above under technological sustainability)
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instrumentation and population of the infrastructure with community specific data and services•
education, training and research support for existing and future usersThere are various instruments to make these things happen in a sustainable way, and they are all used to some extent by the current ESFRI Landmark SSH RIs. For example, building knowledge about the availability of RIs within standard university curricula is a good, sustainable long-term investment. In the shorter term the obligation for infrastructures to build and maintain what could be called a ‘Knowledge Sharing Infrastructure’ is important. Knowledge Sharing Infrastructure is a formalized way of recognizing and sharing knowledge across members. It is an acknowledgement that not all useful knowledge can be concentrated at the central level, and that the knowledge present at the national level is crucial for the sustainability and has to be made visible and shared. This is particularly true for digital, distributed infrastructures like the SSH RIs.