Position Papers

Improving Research Impact Assessment in Horizon Europe: A Perspective from the Social Sciences and Humanities

In this paper, the Alliance recommends that to best capture the impact of research, researchers must be enabled to use a diversity of methods, data sources and forms of explaining the impact of their projects. EASSH invites the European Commission to capture impact not project by project, but on the wider terrain of the overall calls’ aims.

Social and Humanities Research Must Be Given A Major Role in Horizon Europe

In view of the final design of Horizon Europe, EASSH would like to cast teh European Parliament attention to key priorities to ensure that the human and societal dimensions of the challenges at the heart of people across the EU are more strongly and more comprehensively addressed than in previous Framework Programmes. EASSH calls upon the European Parliament for a strong cluster which focus on social and humanities research which must play a major role in Horizon Europe. In a letter to the ITRE committee, EASSH stresses the importance of a well resourced cluster with funding comparable to all other clusters. EASSH also calls for including SSH led intervention areas across all clusters to ensure a plurality of approaches to EU society priorities.

Plan S - A contribution from the Social Sciences and Humanities scientific community

In response to the consultation on Plan S, EASSH has submitted a paper and some key recommendations for the implementation task force. In the paper, EASSH recognises Plan S overall principles to make available and affordable the results and publications of publicly funded research. However, we raise concerns about the implementation and its timetable, which could hamper European research for years to come and we flag possible unintended adverse effects on the next generation of scholars in Europe. We address three main areas of concern: (a) quality and licences; (b) impact on European scholars’ career in a fair and competitive international research system; (c) infrastructures and OA platforms (including impact on learned societies). We propose a set of recommendations to facilitate the next phase of implementation.

Horizon 2020: Struggling with Interdisciplinarity. The 3rd SSH Integration Monitor Report Reveals the Truth about Top Down Interdisciplinarity (June 2018)

If we take the integration of Social Sciences and Humanities as the best effort to foster interdisciplinarity in Horizon 2020, the third EC monitoring report demonstrates that largely the programme is struggling with the implementation of the interdisciplinarity approach.

All FP9 Global Challenges must be more equally resourced

EASSH calls for equity in investment in research and innovation across all the challenges of the 9th Framework Programme and for the ‘cluster’ on human-social dimensions to be recognised as of equal importance to the investments in technological solutions. In this paper, we suggest that the real driver of research costs is scientific methods, which are no longer specific to a given set of disciplines and scientific enquiries.

People's Union

Together, Civil Society Europe (CSE) and the European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities (EASSH) call for an ambitious investment in FP9 for a grand challenge to achieve a People’s Union, covering research addressing EU citizens' main concerns. The paper focuses on three main points: