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.

CLIMAGECARE explores ageing social care and older people's care experiences in the context of the climate crisis in villages on the Spain-Portugal border. The border and rural areas of Spain and Portugal share environmental and social conditions that impact the care of older people because depopulation processes and the lack of care policies in social and health programmes are causing a care crisis, and the current climate crisis is increasing the number of forest fires and the temperatures in these border areas, which mainly affect the ageing population. This project adopts a critical and reflexive approach to understand how ageing care is delivered in these rural border areas in a context of climate crisis. It analyses: (1) ageing social care in relation of the primary health system, community and families in the context of climate crisis events such as forest fires and increased temperatures, and (2) the daily care experiences of older people in the context of climate crisis events and their cultural construction of care and self-care based on their relationship with local care actors and the non-human environment. The design of CLIMAGECARE is grounded in empirical and interdisciplinary research, crosscutting the fields of care studies, environmental studies and medical anthropology to understand the dynamics of the relationships between ageing care and the climate crisis. The project will use qualitative research methods and a co-creation approach in two villages on the central Spain-Portugal border to answer the research questions.

Information access systems provide users with key information from reliable sources such as scientific literature; however, non-experts tend to avoid these sources due to its complex language or their lack of background knowledge. Text simplification removes some of these barriers. SimpleText will be a step forward to make research really open, accessible and understandable for everyone and help to counter fake news based on scientific results (sustainable development goal QUALITY EDUCATION). This is especially important with an explosion of open science during the COVID-19 pandemic. Simplified texts are more accessible for non-native speakers, young readers, people with reading disabilities or lower levels of education (sustainable development goal REDUCED INEQUALITY). Automatic text simplification could be useful for various domains such as scientific communication, science journalism, politics and education. SimpleText tackles technical challenges and evaluation challenges by providing appropriate algorithms, data and benchmarks for text simplification and aims to answer the following research questions: RQ1 - What textual expression carrying information should be simplified (document and passage to be included in the simplified summary)? RQ2 - What kind of background information should be provided (what terms should be contextualised by giving a definition, use-case, example etc.)? RQ3 - How to improve the readability of a given short text (e.g. by reducing vocabulary and syntactic complexity) with acceptable rate of information distortion? RQ4 - To what extent are the approaches for English applicable for French? We will provide algorithms, collections and evaluation tools openly available to the scientific community (to the extent permitted by third-party copyrights) and will be valued at international evaluation campaigns, e.g. CLEF as well as at classes on pre-editing, web-site localisation, technical writing and digital humanities.

The APPREL2 project aims to provide an account of the learning and development of the foreign language (FL or L2) lexicon in a schooling context. This context is characterized by the fact that L1 reading acquisition in still ongoing in children and that exposure to the L2 is quantitatively low. The project draws upon theoretical models developed in cognitive psycholinguistics: first, the well-structured models of skilled visual word recognition in bilinguals (especially, the BIA and BIA+ models, Dijkstra et al, 1998; Dijkstra et al 2002); and second, the models developed to describe the process of learning to read in monolinguals (Ehri, 2014). The project aims to test a developmental version of bilingual visual word recognition, BIA-d (Grainger et al, 2010), and to extend it by integrating a phonological component. This approach will be complemented by a language-teaching perspective that aims to connect our experimental studies to classrooms situations and to situate (visual) word recognition within a broader spectrum of emerging L2 skill and knowledge. Models of L2 lexical development (DevLex, MacWhinney) will therefore also be considered. The scientific objectives are to demonstrate how L2 words are progressively integrated in the lexicon and to analyse how L1 –L2 lexical and sublexical information interacts. We will assess how L2 word processing, especially written words, evolves according to children’s age and reading level. We also will examine orthographic processing during L2 word learning. How FL lexicon development is related to reading skills will also be explored through the impact of a partial L2 school immersion on the learning of a L3. The challenge is to trace the benefits of the early learning of two languages and the mastery of two systems of grapheme to phoneme correspondences. The project is organized into four tasks. Task 1 consists of compiling a lexical database, from textbooks, reflecting English written language instruction in secondary school. Quantitative analyses will define word lexical and sublexical characteristics, which will be used to construct assessments of L2/L3 word acquisition. The written database will be completed by transcripts of lessons. The following three tasks are organized according to participant age –leading to the use of different paradigms: word learning in primary school vs. visual -and to a lesser extend spoken- word recognition in secondary school- and the L2/L3 learning context (traditional vs. after partial immersion in L2). Task 2 aims to assess L2 word recognition development in secondary school via several experiments and will focus on L1 and L2 lexical and sublexical interactions. Task 3 is designed to investigate the effects of partial L2 immersion during L3 word processing, in terms of the development of both linguistic and word recognition skills. The aim is to assess the effects of partial immersion in L2 during L3 word processing, in terms of both linguistic development and word recognition. Task 4 uses learning experiments conducted with developing reading at primary school to assess the contribution of orthographic information in L2 word memorization. Task 4 also includes experiments in immersion programs in order to locate the benefits of the immersion situation by manipulating the L2/L3 linguistic proximity of words in word learning experiments. The project brings researchers with expertise in reading acquisition, L2 word learning, lexical databases and language teaching. The main deliverables from the project are a lexical database for L2 English words in secondary school, dissemination papers, and concrete methodological recommendations for L2 teaching. Scientific papers will be submitted to high-impact journals and conferences, and papers will be published in professional journals to reach leading players (teachers, conseillers pédagogiques, the Inspection) in foreign language teaching in primary and secondary schools.

According to the last WESO report, there are over 1.4bn workers in vulnerable jobs worldwide, with numbers expected to rise in 2020 due to COVID-19. Several attempts have been made at both domestic and international levels to address these concerns. This includes efforts through the Sustainable Development Goals process, which includes a specific statistical indicator to measure informal employment (8.3.1), the formulation of SDG8 (decent work) and SDG9 (sustainable industrialization). Across countries and world regions, the degree to which SDGs have been used to address youth issues and inform national policies varies significantly. Indeed, in spite of the fact that the great majority of states have formally committed to addressing the SDGs, including those related to insecure employment, there is little evidence to indicate that developing regions currently have the capacity to systematically study the problems if informal employment and vulnerability in ways that facilitate the development and implementation of concrete viable solutions. This is due, in our view, to two major challenges. First, although a number of approaches that have been used inside the EU, there has been little, if any, attempt to adapt the existing framework elsewhere. Second, no systematic review of anti-precariousness policy has been attempted beyond the EU region. LABOUR is a research and training programme designed to address the above-mentioned shortfalls of research and development approaches with particular attention to a region where this is particularly worrying concern. Informal employment in Asia is estimated to account for 68.2% of the active population. By gathering a team of 14 participants that includes academic and non-academic partners working on labour insecurity, we aim not only at producing specialists on the topic and on the region but also at proposing concrete mitigation measures that can be taken into account by decision-makers and development organisations.