The Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) is a distributed Research Infrastructures serving as a large-scale, integrated and sustainable platform for data services relevant to the Social Sciences. It supports high-quality, national and international research and cooperation by bringing together Social Science data archives across Europe, and expand easy access to data and metadata regardless of borders. CESSDA is aiming at facilitating social, economic and political research, thus contributing to the production of effective solutions to the major challenges facing society today. CESSDA supports continuous learning and training of its data providers and user community to cover research data management, data discovery and reuse, digital preservation and data archiving.

Since its establishment in 1976, CESSDA served as an informal umbrella organisation for European national Social Science data archives. In the ESFRI Roadmap since 2006, CESSDA has been listed as success story in the Roadmap 2010 and was recognised as ESFRI Landmarks in 2016. It became a legal institution limited company under Norwegian law (CESSDA AS) in 2013 and then an European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) in 2017. Norway is hosting CESSDA, and the main office is located in Bergen. Presently 16 countries are Members of the Consortium and one country is a formal Observer, each represented by a national institution providing relevant services. Additionally, Social Science data archives from other European countries are cooperating, taking part to some activities or aiming at membership.