From June 2013 the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA AS) is established as a legal pan-European distributed research infrastructure that will provide full scale, integrated and sustainable data services. Its Main Office is in Bergen, Norway and has Service Providers in each country that take part in the CESSDA cooperation. The consortium is a continuation of the Council of European Social Science Data Archives that since 1976 existed as an umbrella organisation for social science data archives across Europe. The major objective for CESSDA is to provide seamless access to data across repositories, nations, languages and research purposes. CESSDA will encourage standardisation of data and metadata, data sharing and knowledge mobility across Europe. CESSDA aims to play an active part in the development of standards and to encourage and facilitate the use of metadata standards for documenting and publishing the existing inventories of research data available from national as well as cross-national resources in Europe. The following European countries are founding members of the new CESSDA: Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom. More countries are expected to join. CESSDA is a project on the ESFRI Roadmap of Research Infrastructures (RIs) of pan-European interest.