On the 15th of May, the University of Barcelona hosted a workshop entitled Social Sciences and Humanities meet ORCID: towards a fruitful collaboration, attended by more than 70 researchers from over 25 departments and diverse research groups in SSH with a focus on Law, Human Rights, Linguistics, Communication and Media, Education, Demographic studies, from 7 Catalan universities.

The ORCID workshop was held in the framework of the FP7 IMPACT-EV Project and was chaired by Marta Soler from the coordinating team and first SSH researcher elected as a member of ORCID’S Board of Directors. With two separate roundtables on Social Sciences and Humanities, the workshop met the goal of opening up a space for debate about the usefulness of the ORCID initiative in the research areas of Social Sciences and Humanities, as well as the particularities of SSH that should be taken into account in this kind of initiatives.

The session on Social Sciences included the participation of Vicente Royuela  (Faculty of Economy and Business, UB, and a member of the coordinating team of the FP7 IAREG project), Teresa Sordé (UAB, researcher in INCLUD-ED and member of IMPACT-EV). The session on Humanities included the presentations of Ignasi Pastó (general research coordinator at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution) and Ignasi Xavier Adiego, (member of the Institute of Ancient Near East, UB). Consol Garcia (ORCID Outreach Group, UPC) was also representing ORCID in both sessions.

During the sessions, an intense debate was held about the current dynamics in external evaluation of the research in SSH disciplines, and reflections were shared towards building a new system of evaluation that can better reflect the way that the knowledge produced in these disciplines achieves scientific, social and political impact. In this regard, the role of ORCID was discussed as to the opportunity that it means to optimise the international visibility and recognition of the researchers’ careers.