While today many researchers worldwide have incorporated in their discourses the importance of addressing the social impact of research and being accountable to citizens and society, the origin of this achievement comes from a long story of doing research with high excellence and measurable societal impact.
The concepts of social impact and co-creation were brought to the Scientific Program of the European Commission through the FP5 research project WORKALO, a project that using the communicative methodology achieved in 2005 the recognition of the Roma as a people of Europe by the European Parliament. The first time that the European Commission Research Program made a list of the 10 success stories for the added social value was in 2011; the only SSH research among these ten was INCLUD-ED, which provided scientific evidence of the social impact of successful actions that reduced inequalities. The researchers of this project were then commissioned to elaborate the Key Impact Pathways criteria for Social Impact of the current Horizon Europe program of research.
The elaboration of these criteria was done amid international debates on the social impact of science, in which these researchers had a leading role. They organized in Barcelona the First International Conference on the Social Impact of Science, SIS2016, involving Nobel Prize awardees in Physics, Chemistry and Medicine, scientific publishers and platforms such as Nature, PLoS and ORCID, funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation (US) or the European Research Framework Program (UE), and researchers from all sciences and 40 countries worldwide. The crucial dialogues among researchers, publishers, funders and science policy decisionmakers were possible and facilitated through these leading researchers of the Barcelona School of Dialogic Society.
For instance, in one of the dialogues, the Nobel Prize scientist Harald Zur Haussen discussed the importance of collaborations between medical scientists and social scientists about the social impacts of implementing the papilloma vaccine or the increase of medical check-ups to prevent cervical cancer. In another dialogue, senior editors from Nature with researchers from this Barcelona School designed the orientation to gather the social impact of the scientific contributions they publish. There were many dialogues that have made possible that today scientific institutions and academia recognize the right that citizens have to benefit from the advances of science, but not only as an ethical discourse of intentions, but most importantly as the right to see the scientific discoveries as well as the scientific evidence of the social impact that these discoveries have in the improvement of their lives.
Ten years ago, in this SIS2016 Conference, in his address about science evaluation in Europe, the representative from the scientific program of the European Commission said publicly to the dialogic organizers: “you were the machine perfectly oiled when we actually needed it”. Today in 2026 social impact is a requirement.
Harvard PhD, Full Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona, President of the European Sociological Association 2019-2021