Europe 2020 was launched in 2010 as European Union’s ten-year growth and jobs strategy to overcome the currently crisis and to create the necessary conditions for a smart, sustainable and inclusive Europe. In order to achieve that by the end of 2020, five headline targets have been fixed for the European Societies, covering employment, research and development, climate/energy, education, social inclusion and poverty (European Commission, 2010).

In this sense, one of the main challenges of the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) projects is to generate a new knowledge that can be useful for policy making and development of strategies and actions that contribute to societal improvement (regarding for instance to the Europe 2020’s goals). However, the social impact of the research in SSH has been strongly questioned, especially because the difficulty to evaluate the finding’s usefulness of the SSH projects (European Union, 2009; European Commission, 2013).

Due to this context, the European Commission funded the project “IMPACT-EV, Evaluating the impact and outcomes of EU SSH research” (2014-2017), which main objective is to define the future system of monitoring and evaluation of the scientific, political and social impact of the SSH Researches in Europe. A special attention is given to the social impact, defined as results that beyond being disseminated and transferred have demonstrated to lead to improvements related to the EU2020 goals.

The exhaustive literature review regarding the current situation of the social impact assessment reveals both the increasing interest on this issue and the difficulties for achieving a common conceptual framework and satisfactory criteria and tools for its measurement (van der Meulen & Rip, 2000; Bornmann, 2013). As neither qualitative nor quantitative methods alone appear to be sufficient to evaluate the societal impact of researches, there are efforts to combine and integrate quantitative indicators with qualitative data. Case studies are also considered (Evaluating Research in Context (ERiC), 2010; Schmoch, et al. 2010; de Jong et al., 2011; Donovan, 2011; Penfield et al., 2014). Case studies and the involvement of stakeholders are some of the strategies that are being claimed.

Educational research faces the challenge of the whole spectrum of social sciences in order to demonstrate its proximity to the key goals of the European Agenda, and in particular, to those related to education (reduction of the rates of early school leavers below 10%, and increase of the percentage of Higher Education graduates with at least, 40% of 30-34 year-olds completing third level education).

One of the activities of the IMPACT-EV project consisted on the assessment of the impacts of EU funded research in SSH, with the aim of identifying Success Stories that will be further explored in depth. Beyond mapping the actual impacts of research, IMPACT-EV has the aim of contributing to place the social usefulness of research results at the heart of the investigation purposes. Against the current lack of visibility and acknowledgement of the social impact (compared to scientific impact, for instance), IMPACT-EV has created a new repository called SIOR (Social Impact Open Repository), capable of displaying, citing and storing the social impact of research results. Taking into account that, SIOR arises from the social and political need to know and to connect with the scientific projects in order to assess their social impact, promoting transparency of science and open access systems.

In this paper we explain the research and assessment of the social impact of SSH research in regards to the education EU2020 goals and the main features of the SIOR, looking at its relevance for the field of educational research. 

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