Developing a Collaboratory for Diverse SSH Citizen Science Stakeholders - the VERA Design

VERA - Virtual Ecosystem for Research Activation is an online platform built in the framework of the EU funded project COESO. ”Activation” is the key word to remember from this acronym. One important strategy for activating research is for society members to be proactively involved in co-creating it. But how? There is a need to bridge society with research, and that is what VERA is doing. VERA is a hub where researchers and key society stakeholders (community-based organizations, experts of practice, service providers, politicians, journalists, etc.) can meet and collaborate to identify and solve societal issues through SSH (social science and humanities)-focused citizen science, thereby opening research to the public. Within the VERA platform, society members and researchers alike can create a personal profile to find others who are interested in the same topics and build research teams and projects together. When society and research are bridged, collaborations are enabled, innovative methodologies are created, and solutions to relevant issues are discovered. The design and development of VERA were the result of an intense collaboration itself. The platform was in fact co-designed involving the SSH citizen science community from the very beginning. Furthermore, VERA is interoperable by design; it is currently integrated with EUCitizen.Science, GoTRIPLE and Fundit platform to support project's visibility, identification of potential collaborators and relevant researchers and to identify funding opportunities. Keywords: citizen science, collaborative platforms.