Horizon 2020
EASSH Response to EC Consultation on Horizon Europe (September 2019)
2020-12-01
EASSH continues to support the focus on a strong and well-resourced Pillar. We support a coherent set of equitably resourced clusters, which retain a central focus on addressing citizens’ concerns. Social sciences and humanities are scholarly fields on a par with medicine or engineering, for example. The contributions made by researchers in SSH must be assessed by suitably qualified experts.

SSH Integration
Interdisciplinary perspectives for Horizon Europe: Lessons from the 4th SSH Integration Monitor Report
2020-11-29
EASSH welcomes the continued commitment of the European Commission to integrate SSH expertise and to continue evaluating the quality of such integration. However, in the four years of monitoring Horizon 2020 (2012-2017), the integration of SSH across the societal challenges has remained very weak.

Research Impact
Improving Research Impact Assessment in Horizon Europe: A Perspective from the Social Sciences and Humanities
2020-11-28
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.

Research Clusters
Social and Humanities Research Must Be Given A Major Role in Horizon Europe
2020-11-27
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.

Research Dissemination
Plan S - A contribution from the Social Sciences and Humanities scientific community
2020-11-26
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.

Interdisciplinary Approach
Horizon 2020: Struggling with Interdisciplinarity. The 3rd SSH Integration Monitor Report Reveals the Truth about Top Down Interdisciplinarity (June 2018)
2020-11-24
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.