This open access book provides a comprehensive exploration of research infrastructures (RIs) for open social science research, drawing on the case study of the FOSSR project. It covers the theoretical foundations, policy contexts, and FAIR data principles, before diving into the FOSSR project’s research areas, governance, and capacity building strategies. The final sections focus on computational social science, collaborative research models, and future challenges in open science. With its interdisciplinary perspective and actionable insights, this book serves as a useful resource for researchers, policymakers, and data scientists working in the realm of open social science.

Giovanni Cerulli is research director at IRCrES-CNR, Research Institute on Sustainable Economic Growth, National Research Council of Italy, Unit of Rome. His research interest is in applied econometrics, with a special focus on causal inference, program evaluation, and machine learning applied to various fields of socio-economic science. Giovanni has developed original causal inference models, such as dose-response and treatment models with social interaction providing Stata implementation. He has developed around twenty Stata commands for casual inference and machine learning working also on Stata/Python/R integration for this purpose. Giovanni is author of the book Econometric Evaluation of Socio-Economic Programs: Theory and Applications (Springer, 2015; second edition 2022), and of the book Fundamentals of Supervised Machine Learning: with Applications in Python, R, and Stata (Springer, 2023). He has published his papers in several high-quality scientific journals, and is currently editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computational Economics and Econometrics.

Emanuela Reale, sociologist, has been director of the Research Institute on Sustainable Economic Growth – IRCrES CNR until 2023 and currently is associate senior at IRCrES. Her research areas are higher education and research policies, with a focus on governance, R&D funding, research evaluation, STI indicators. Emanuela was principal researcher and coordinator of several international and national projects -most recent the RISIS European infrastructure for science technology and innovation research, the PRIN2017 on the effects of evaluation on the academic work, and the FOSSR PNRR-IR project. Emanuela is President of the European Forum for Studies on Research and Innovation Policies-EU-SPRI and co-Editor of Research Evaluation. Emanuela has published and is a reviewer in numerous international journals and books.