The mission of CESSDA is to provide a full scale sustainable research infrastructure enabling the research community to conduct high-quality research in the social sciences contributing to the production of effective solutions to the major challenges facing society today and to facilitate teaching and learning in the social sciences.

Member countries seek to increase the scientific excellence and efficacy of European research in the social sciences, as well as to expand easy access to data and metadata regardless of borders. They want to provide a research infrastructure for their researchers, and join forces among their (national) data service providers.

Our vision

Our vision is that the provision of access to social science data and metadata is vital – for both science and society.

For this we must offer services to data producers to easily describe and store their data – if needed in a secured environment.

We will adhere to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles to make data findable and provide information about the data, where they are, how they can be accessed.

We will also focus on providing training and enabling the transfer of expertise and sharing of knowledge on data, as well as relevant rules and regulations.

CESSDA wants to be a consortium of trusted repositories with full European coverage, offering a platform with tools and services to both data producers and data re-users.

We want to be part of the European Open Science Cloud – especially on social science data.

By 2022, CESSDA should be leading in data discovery.

Consult the Statutes of CESSDA ERIC (.pdf) and our Scientific Policies.