Impact and success of research infrastructures


Impact and success of 
research infrastructures 

Steven Krauwer 

CLARIN ERIC 

21-06-2018 



Success and impact are not the same thing 

• Success: To what extent do we manage to do what we 
promised to do. This is the typical project scenario, with 
given goal and time frame, where every step is under our 
control and responsibility.  

• Impact: Simon Taller (2012) defines impact as “the 
measurable outcomes arising from the existence of a digital 
resource that demonstrate a change in the life or life 
opportunities of the community for which the resource is 
intended”. 

• Taller’s focus was on the impact of Digital Resources, ours 
will be on Research Infrastructures (RIs) for the Social 
Sciences and Humanities & Cultural Heritage (SSH&CH). 

 

 
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A layered approach for RIs in SSH&CH 

• Economic impact: to what extent do the construction and 
operation of the RI generate economic activity in or around 
the RI 

• Impact on the scientific landscape: how does the RI affect 
the life or life opportunities of SSH&CH researchers and 
practitioners (including students) 

• Impact on research results: how does the landscape as 
changed by the RI affect the research results 

• Societal impact: how do the research results that were  
obtained thanks to the RI affect society at large 

 

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Economic impact 

• For distributed data infrastructures in SSH&CH there are 
hardly any significant economic benefits that follow from 
the construction and operation of the RI (as opposed to 
hard sciences) 

• Commercial exploitation of SSH&CH research results 
obtained through the use of the RI may be possible, but it 
may be hard to demonstrate the role of the RI in the final 
products or services  

 

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Impact on the scientific landscape (i) 

This is about the facilities and opportunities we as RIs offer to 
researchers, practitioners and students – and therefore easy 
to measure qualitatively and quantitatively and to describe, 
and to formulate KPIs. Below some main features of CLARIN. 

• Having a well-developed technical infrastructure populated 
with data and services is not sufficient, as in SSH&CH the 
digital transformation has only just started 

• In CLARIN we have, parallel to the technical infrastructure, 
our Knowledge Sharing Infrastructure, which serves to 
facilitate knowledge transfer between all stakeholders on a 
European scale, covering a broad range of training activities 

• Common standards create optimal opportunities to 
combine and re-use data and tools from different sources so 
that researchers can collaborate and build on each other’s 
results, and increase their collective scientific impact 

 
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Impact on the scientific landscape (ii) 

• Publication of examples of successful use cases should help 
to attract and inspire new users 

• Collection and promotion of special families of language 
resources (e.g. newspaper texts, parliamentary records, 
social media and oral history) and tools to work with them 
should help to bring together researchers from different 
countries or disciplines for joint research projects 

 

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Impact on research output 

This is about the uptake of what we offer by our users and the 
research and education results it leads to. 

• What we can measure and formulate KPIs for is the number 
of users, course participants, visits, downloads, requests, etc 

• The extent to which researchers have successfully made use 
of our facilities for their research will only be visible and 
measurable if they give credit for it in their publications. 
Developing and promoting proper citation habits is an 
important common action point for data RIs. 

 

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Societal impact 

This is about the extent to which SSH&CH research supported 
by RIs leads to better understanding of who we are and how 
society works – but how to measure this and what exactly is 
the contribution by the RI? 

• Uptake by policymakers and media is a clear signal – but RI 
role largely invisible, as they would normally refer to 
scientific articles and publications in the best case, but not 
to their sources 

• For the assessment of the impact that we make on society 
as a whole we are largely dependent on “circumstantial 
evidence”, such as reputation.  

• In this context the DARIAH Impactomatrix is a rich source of 
inspiration to identify factors that can help boosting the 
impact, and criteria to (indirectly) measure the effects. 

 

 
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Concluding remarks 

• Measuring our own efforts to have an impact is easy, 
measuring the result is hard. 

• European SSH&CH is diverse, and not focused on specific 
common targets such as putting a man on the moon, using 
nuclear fusion to produce electricity or solving the cancer 
problem. This makes notions such as progress and impact 
hard to define. 

• It is my feeling that disciplines are much better off if they 
are backed by a generally acknowledged societal threat or 
disaster, such as pollution, energy crisis, ageing population 
or climate change 

• I still hope that Europe will one day see that social climate 
change is as much of a threat as the other ones (as the 
migration problem clearly illustrates) and that a coordinated 
Europe-wide SSH&CH research effort is needed to address it 

• RIs are in an excellent position to play a role in this and 
should think about what they could do to facilitate this 

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