The COESO (Collaborative Engagement on Societal Issues) project facilitates and supports participatory research in SSH, through a service-first approach. COESO supports ten Citizen Science pilots presenting a variety of disciplines, societal challenges and types of engagement with citizens in different European countries. COESO project will specifically support collaborative practices in Citizen Science by developing a Virtual Ecosystem for Research Activation (VERA), a platform envisioned as a "collaboratory” providing a set of tools to discover potential partners, to define and co-design the activities, to co-create new knowledge and solutions, and to deliver them to society. COESO will furthermore collaborate with research funding organizations to enhance financial support to Citizen Science projects in the SSH and explore the frontiers of innovation in SSH public engagement by achieving a complete mutual learning with the teams involved in the Pilots. Finally, “Cooperation analytics” will be designed to measure the quality of collaboration between researchers and citizens in VERA. Those analytics will be useful to the project teams themselves but they will also be a major contribution to funders, policy makers, research organizations and other stakeholders supporting Citizen Science policies. COESO’s overall objective is to overcome the obstacles that hinder the development of Citizen Science in the SSH. COESO will enable a dramatic growth of Citizen Science projects in these disciplines and will intensify the collaborations between SSH researchers and citizens to tackle together the many societal challenges European societies face today. VERA will be one of the core services offered by OPERAS Research Infrastructure to the scientific community.

The French Institutes for Advanced Study (FIAS) Fellowship Programme strengthens high-level scholarship and international mobility in the European Research Area by upgrading the offering of scientific residencies to experienced researchers in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH) and in other sciences interfacing with them. The Institutes for Advanced Study (IAS)—located in Cergy, Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Nantes, Orléans-Tours, and Paris—form a large scientific consortium that proposes a unified entry point in France to seven first-class research, training and networking residencies. The 112 fellowships to be offered will provide experienced scholars worldwide with the opportunity to spend 10 months in leading scientific, economic and cultural regions in Europe. FIAS supports individual professional development as fellows benefit from unsegmented time to conduct bottom-up research with the greatest freedom and enjoy outstanding material and intellectual conditions. Thanks to the IAS’ scientific and extra-academic support, the FIAS experience brings fellows to the next level of excellence and generates a significant boost to their careers: 1. It enables fellows to produce important work that would have taken them years to achieve; 2. It stimulates new perspectives on research thanks to daily interaction and collective intelligence of the international and multidisciplinary cohort of fellows and to the individual mentoring; 3. It enriches the fellows’ professional networks with local and international contacts in academia and beyond to develop long-term collaborations; 4. It offers vast training opportunities that improve fellows' research and non-academic skills and level up their individual professional achievements and prospects. FIAS will impact the career development of each fellow, consolidating its strong track record in terms of recruitments and promotions, publications, awards and grants, and extra-academic recognition.

The French Institutes for Advanced Study Fellowship Programme proposes to strengthen scholarship and mobility in the Social Sciences and Humanities by enlarging and upgrading the offering of scientific residencies in France to international experienced researchers. It will provide SSH scholars worldwide the possibility to spend one academic year in four of France’s most innovative scientific regions. The four French Institutes for Advanced Study of Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier and Paris teamed up to propose a unified and simplified entry point to their much-coveted scientific residencies. FIAS-FP will support individual research as fellows, released from teaching and academic commitments, will conduct in unsegmented time bottom-up research with the greatest freedom, with the IAS strong scientific and extra-academic support. The FIAS-FP experience is designed to provide fellows with the material and intellectual conditions that will generate a significant boost to their professional careers: 1. It enables fellows to produce in a short time what would have taken years to do in the fragmented time at their home institutions (because of administration and teaching commitments); 2. They get exposed to the collective benevolent intelligence of international and multidisciplinary cohorts of fellows, which brings their work to a higher, and often transdisciplinary level; 3. This new international and interdisciplinary network is an asset for scholarship and project building; 4. They are offered a vast range of training opportunities to improve their research and non-academic skills. FIAS-FP is thus designed to foster intellectual exchanges amongst fellows and with the local scientific community, exposing them to innovative methods, opening new theoretical horizons, and creating international transdisciplinary networks among fellows and beyond. FIAS-FP will offer 120 fellowships of 10-month to experienced SSH researchers over a 60-month period.

NET4SOCIETY4 will be the transnational network of National Contact Points (NCPs) for Societal Challenge 6 (SC6) “Inclusive, innovative, and reflective societies” in Horizon 2020. NCPs are set up to guide researchers in their quest for securing EU funding. NET4SOCIETY4 will further develop the current NET4SOCIETY network of SC6 NCPs (former NCPs for Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities), which was first established in 2008 and includes currently around 80 SC6 NCPs from Europe and beyond. NET4SOCIETY4 will ensure that all SC6 NCPs have the relevant knowledge and skills for their work and can offer professional, high-quality and tailor-made services to applicants. All nominated SC6 NCPs (also non-beneficiaries) will have access to information and capacity building tools such as workshops, NCP Info days, trainings, webinars, factsheets or newsletters. NET4SOCIETY4 foresees targeted activities to support applicants in SC6. The project will facilitate interdisciplinary and international consortium building through the organisation of brokerage events, through a dedicated partner search service and through a research directory of SC6 key players. In addition, NET4SOCIETY4 will organise expert meetings e.g. on “impact” of SC6 research and disseminate the meetings’ results to NCPs and applicants. To support the successful implementation of “embedding” Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in all parts of Horizon 2020, NET4SOCIETY4 will carry out surveys on the integration of SSH in Horizon 2020. The project will publish success stories and factsheets on “embedding”, as well as a document listing funding opportunities for SSH in all of Horizon 2020. NET4SOCIETY4 will organise two large conferences in the thematic area of SC6 to provide visibility to the funding programme and the possibility to discuss future research needs. Various promotion activities enhancing the visibility of NET4SOCIETY4 services and the SC6 in Horizon 2020 will underline these efforts.