CESSDA has released its 2025 Annual Report, offering an overview of the consortium’s activities, achievements, and continued development throughout the past year. The report highlights CESSDA’s growing role in the European and international research infrastructure landscape, supporting open science, trustworthy data repositories, metadata standards, data reuse, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

See and download the full CESSDA 2025 Annual Report here.

In the 2025 report, Matthias Reiter-Pázmándy, Chair of the General Assembly, reflects on his first year in the role, thanking the CESSDA community for its trust and recognising the work of former Chair Helena Laaksonen, Director Bonnie Wolff-Boenisch, and the Main Office in Bergen. He underlines CESSDA’s position as an ESFRI Landmark and an important actor in the development of the European Open Science Cloud, while highlighting FAIR data as a foundation for better research and evidence-informed policymaking.

CESSDA Director Bonnie Wolff-Boenisch looks back on a busy year marked by new European project activity, the continued development of CESSDA’s work on artificial intelligence, and the consortium’s engagement in trustworthy digital repositories through the FIDELIS project. She also reflects on CESSDA’s contribution to the EOSC Federation, its participation in cross-disciplinary and international events, and her election as ERIC Forum Chair from January 2026.

Some 2025 Highlights

• Lithuania officially became a full member of CESSDA ERIC, with the Lithuanian Data Archive for Social Sciences and Humanities (LiDA) serving as the national Service Provider.
   
• CESSDA published several key documents, including Top 5 Key Performance Indicators, Measuring What Matters, The battle for trust: Advancing the social science data ecosystem, and a new Data Citation Guide.
   
• CESSDA’s KPI work showed continued growth across the consortium, including more than 41,000 archived primary digital objects by 2024, 575,000 datasets delivered, and nearly 600 training sessions delivered to 14,000 users.
   
• CESSDA strengthened its contribution to the European Open Science Cloud, with Service Providers and the Main Office taking part in EOSC working groups, focus groups, and the development of the EOSC Federation Handbook.
   
• The General Assembly met in Bergen and Vienna, approving CESSDA’s work plan, the work plans of six Working Groups for 2026–2027, a biannual budget, and the establishment of a new Core Work Group on AI.
   
• CESSDA continued to support the development of the SSH Open Science Cluster and the future SSHOC Competence Centre, contributing to work on the SSHOC Marketplace and the wider OSCARS project.
   
• CESSDA participated in major European and international events, including the European Geosciences Union General Assembly, the 50th IASSIST Conference, ESRA, ISA, MEDem, International Data Week in Brisbane, ANDOR in France, and the BRIDGE Conference in Bucharest.
   
• CESSDA promoted metadata standards through its strong presence at the 17th European DDI Users Conference, where DDI-CDI and support for smaller archives were key topics.
   
• CESSDA’s Working Groups advanced work on trust, artificial intelligence, data citation, sensitive data, Dataverse, interoperability, training, the CESSDA Data Catalogue, ELSST, the Vocabulary Service, the European Question Bank, and expert guidance for data archiving and management.
   
• CESSDA continued its involvement in major European projects, including OSTrails, EOSC-ENTRUST, EOSC Beyond, OSCARS, Infra4NextGen, GGP-5D, ERIC Forum 2, and FIDELIS, while concluding work in COORDINATE, FAIR-IMPACT, and RITrainPlus.
   
• Communications activity continued to grow, with new publications, community stories, social media updates, website activity, and newsletters helping to share CESSDA’s work with a wider audience.
   
• Financially, the 2025 statements confirm CESSDA’s stable operations and continued investment in strategic development.

See the annual report and other CESSDA documents here.