EUROPEAN SOCIAL SURVEY EUROPEAN RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE CONSORTIUM

Their core work

ESS ERIC operates the European Social Survey, one of Europe's flagship cross-national survey programmes measuring attitudes, beliefs, and behaviour patterns across 30+ countries. As a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), they design and run rigorous, repeated social surveys that produce high-quality comparative data used by governments, researchers, and policy analysts. They also drive methodological innovation in survey science — including web panel development — and work to ensure their data infrastructure aligns with FAIR and Open Science principles within the European Open Science Cloud ecosystem.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In the early H2020 period (2015–2018), ESS ERIC concentrated on mapping the international research infrastructure landscape, positioning itself within the ESFRI roadmap, and building foundational data infrastructure for social sciences. From 2019 onward, the focus shifted decisively toward Open Science integration (SSHOC, EOSC Future), long-term sustainability models, and expanding global reach — including web panel methodology and connections to the European Values Survey. The trajectory shows an organisation moving from establishing its place in the RI ecosystem to ensuring its data and methods are future-proof and globally connected.

ESS ERIC is investing in digital transformation of its survey methods (web panels) and deeper integration with EOSC, making it an increasingly valuable partner for any project needing high-quality, FAIR-compliant social data across Europe.

How they like to work

ESS ERIC balances leadership and partnership roles — coordinating 3 of its 10 projects (including its two largest by budget) while participating in 7 others. With 193 unique consortium partners across 31 countries, they operate as a well-connected hub in the research infrastructure community rather than a closed network. This makes them an accessible partner: experienced enough to lead major infrastructure projects, yet collaborative enough to join diverse consortia where social survey expertise or RI governance knowledge is needed.

ESS ERIC has collaborated with 193 distinct organisations across 31 countries, reflecting the pan-European nature of their survey operations. Their network spans social science faculties, national statistics offices, and the broader ESFRI research infrastructure community.

What sets them apart

ESS ERIC is one of very few organisations that combines the operational muscle to run repeated cross-national surveys in 30+ countries with deep expertise in research infrastructure governance and sustainability. Their ERIC legal status gives them a unique institutional standing — they are not a university or a company, but a treaty-based European entity purpose-built to deliver comparative social data. For consortium builders, they bring both the data asset itself and hard-won knowledge of how to keep a distributed infrastructure running across borders.

Highlights from their portfolio

• SERISS
  Largest single grant (EUR 3.4M) and coordinated by ESS ERIC — brought together Europe's major social science survey infrastructures to build shared methods and tools.
• SSHOC
  EUR 1.4M participation in the Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud, directly connecting ESS data to the EOSC ecosystem and FAIR principles.
• ESS-SUSTAIN-2
  Coordinated project (EUR 1.9M) explicitly tackling long-term sustainability, global expansion, and the transition to web panel methodology — signals ESS ERIC's strategic direction.