What is the SSH Open Marketplace?

The Social Sciences and Humanities Open Marketplace, built as part of the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud project (SSHOC), is a discovery portal which pools and contextualises resources for Social Sciences and Humanities research communities: tools, services, training materials, datasets, publications and workflows. The Marketplace highlights and showcases solutions and research practices for every step of the SSH research data life cycle.

The SSH Open Marketplace is:

• a discovery portal, to foster serendipity in digital methods
• an aggregator of useful and well curated resources
• a catalogue, contextualising resources
• an entry point in the EOSC for the Social Sciences and Humanities researchers

The SSH Open Marketplace is not:

• a repository. Nothing is hosted in the SSH Open Marketplace. Workflow content type can be hosted, but this is an exception
• a data catalogue. The goal is not to collect all the SSH datasets, but selected datasets are indexed to support the contextualisation (dataset mentioned in a publication or used in a training material for example).
• a commercial Marketplace. There is nothing to sell in the SSH Open Marketplace. Commercial software/services can be referenced.

Three key aspects have been guiding the development of the SSH Open Marketplace.

• Curation – This portal thrives on a curation process that makes it easy to discover the most appropriate results for each request, so that researchers can discover the best resources for the digital aspects of their work. The curation process relies on three components: automatic ingest and update of data sources; continuous curation of the information by the editorial team and – most important – contributions from users, the SSH research community.
• Community – The content available in the SSH Open Marketplace and its contextualisation is the result of collaborative work that is characterised by a user-centric approach. Features that allow contributions, feedback and comments are implemented – or will be soon – to ensure that the portal mirrors real research practices.
• Contextualisation – The portal puts all items into context: each solution suggested is linked to other related resources (e.g. a tutorial showing how to use a tool, a tool used in a workflow, a publication presenting research results produced using a given service). This contextualisation enhances the usefulness of the SSH Open Marketplace and ensures users receive the maximum possible benefit from all its contents.

The creation of the SSH Open Marketplace was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) project which supported the integration and consolidation of thematic e-infrastructure platforms in preparation for connecting them to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The overall objective of the SSHOC project was to realise the Social Sciences and Humanities part of EOSC.

As a domain-oriented discovery portal and the aggregator of the SSHOC project, the SSH Open Marketplace, contributes directly to the EOSC, supplementing existing services such as the EOSC Catalogue & Marketplace, and facilitating the fluid exchange of tools, services, data, and knowledge.

Source: SSHOC project website

After the end of the SSHOC project, 3 ERICs and some of their national nodes will ensure the sustainability of the SSH Open Marketplace. They act as a Governing Board for the SSH Open Marketplace and define the Marketplace strategic policy with regards to scientific, technical and managerial matters.

Two institutions act as service providers on behalf of these ERICs: the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences providing hosting and maintenance for the service, and the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) affiliated to the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences providing the data ingestion pipeline as well as hosting and maintenance for the service.

An Editorial Team ensures the day-to-day maintenance and the data quality of the SSH Open Marketplace. The Editorial Team, liaising with the service providers and the end-users of the service (SSH researchers and support staff for researchers) ensures the technical running of operation, the effectiveness of the curation process and the editorial policy’s successful implementation.

Using the SSH Open Marketplace, you can:

• Search the resources, refining your query through faceted search.
• Browse the content by activities or keywords
• Obtain a detailed view of every item registered in the website, including a structured set of metadata describing the resource, and highlighting the related items to facilitate the discovery of relevant resources
• Contribute to the Marketplace by suggesting new content or enriching existing items. See the Contribute pages for all the details.
• Re-use the SSH Open Marketplace content using the Application programming Interface (API). See the API documentation in the “technical aspects” section, if you want to know more.

• Download the SSH Open Marketplace logos
• Download the flyer (printing and online dissemination)

Reuse some of the slides produced by the team to present the SSH Open Marketplace:

• Laure Barbot, & Klaus Illmayer. (2022, July 28). The SSH Open Marketplace: an introduction. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6924238
• Laure Barbot, & Edward J. Gray. (2022, March 22). Partager et contextualiser ses outils numériques. Tout savoir sur le SSH Open Marketplace. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6375530
• Franciska de Jong. (2022, January 26). A thematic marketplace: The SSH Open Marketplace. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5906660
• Fischer, Frank, Burghardt, Manuel, Luhmann, Jan, Barbot, Laure, Moranville, Yoann, & Zarei, Alireza. (2021, March 26). Die Werkbänke der Digital Humanities: Zur Rolle von Tools und Software für die Forschungsarbeit. vDHd2021: “Experimente”. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4639228

A promotional video, “SSH Open Marketplace - explained the easy way”, has also been created and provides a nice overview of what the SSH Open Marketplace has to offer.

If you want to promote the SSH Open Marketplace as part of your own work, do not hesitate to reuse some of these materials, and to let the team know about it, so that your work can also be referenced in this section.

To know all the details that guided the development choices of the SSH Open Marketplace, you can consult the following reports.

• Laure Barbot, Yoan Moranville, Frank Fischer, Clara Petitfils, Matej Ďurčo, Klaus Illmayer, Tomasz Parkoła, Philipp Wieder, & Sotiris Karampatakis. (2019). SSHOC D7.1 System Specification - SSH Open Marketplace (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3547649
• Matej Ďurčo, Laure Barbot, Klaus Illmayer, Sotiris Karampatakis, Frank Fischer, Yoann Moranville, Joshua Tetteh Ocansey, Stefan Probst, Michał Kozak, Stefan Buddenbohm, & Seung-Bin Yim. (2021). 7.2 Marketplace – Implementation (v1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5749465
• Alexander König, & Dieter Van Uytvanck. (2020). D7.3 Marketplace - Interoperability. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5871651
• Edward Gray, Nicolas Larrousse, Clara Petitfils, Laure Barbot, Frank Fischer, Matej Ďurčo, Klaus Illmayer, Cesare Condordia, Alexander Konig, Dieter Van Uytvanck, & Stefan Buddenbohm. (2021). D7.4 Marketplace – Data population & curation (v1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5783358
• Clara Petitfils, Suzanne Dumouchel, Nicolas Larrousse, Edward J. Gray, Laure Barbot, Arnaud Roi, Matej Ďurčo, Klaus Illmayer, Stefan Buddenbohm, & Tomasz Parkola. (2021). D7.5 Marketplace - Governance. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5608487
• Frank Fischer, & Matej Durco. (2021, April 16). DARIAH Public Demonstration of the SSH Open Marketplace. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4696322
• Buddenbohm, Stefan, Barbot, Laure, Gray, Edward, Willems, Marieke, Larrousse, Nicolas, & Petitfils, Clara. (2021). Requesting Crowd Expertise: The SSH Open Marketplace and LIBER. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4757290
• Laure Barbot, & Edward Gray. (2021, September 29). Sharing digital tools in context: the SSH Open Marketplace. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5535742
• Laure Barbot, Tracey Biller, Daan Broeder, Ron Dekker, Matej Durco, Irene Vipavc, Marieke Willems. Agile development of the SSH Open Marketplace: User Workshop. ITM Web Conf. 33 04001 (2020). DOI: 10.1051/itmconf/20203304001
• Buddenbohm, Stefan. (2020). User Stories for the SSH Open Marketplace. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4312630