The PLACES - Platform for collaborative engagement on societal issues - project is a research and innovation device that will make it possible to analyse citizen science practices and develop a technical service to support them. The objective of PLACES is to propose a solution to the low societal impact of research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. PLACES is a comprehensive system for citizen science observation, which will not only make collaborative research carried out jointly by research teams and other socio-economic actors possible, but will also allow the study of their impact on society and research practices. PLACES will offer concrete technical support to citizen science while exploring diverse and joint professional practices through pilot research. Based on these collaborative researches, PLACES will study, in a comprehensive approach, the effective conditions for carrying out citizen science. The PLACES platform is based on three distinct services: community management and linking professionals (matching service); access to funding sources (international call for proposals database, international network of funders, crowdfunding tool); collaborative project management (management of user rights and profiles, connection to databases and data repositories, interoperability with other work environments, collaboration tools - including discussion and sharing - on text and multimedia data). Fully integrated into the Open Science paradigm, the system implemented by PLACES will make it possible to analyze the impact of citizen science, explore new forms of scientific communication, and reflect on the ethical and legal issues related to the publication and availability of research data according to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-usable). Finally, PLACES will promote the transfer of knowledge and know-how between researchers and other socio-economic actors.

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.