Latest News and Forthcoming Opportunities

CLARIN-UK: a new consortium and a new CLARIN country

The UK is currently preparing an application to join the CLARIN European Research Infrastructure Consortium as an Observer. The Arts and Humanities Research Council, in cooperation with JISC and the other research councils, will make the agreement, and will work closely with the CLARIN-UK consortium to monitor the benefits to the national community. CLARIN-UK currently has ten member institutions, and more are welcome. Members of the consortium have resolved to share the cost of the annual fee (c. £1000 per institution per annum) and staff in consortium member institutions will be eligible for participation in CLARIN activities. Please get in touch if you’d like to join – there is still time to be part of the initial consortium.

CLARIN – a growing family

In the past six months, Portugal, Sweden, Lithuania and Greece have joined CLARIN as full members. Croatia, Finland and Slovenia are close to full membership too, waiting only to cross some minor political and administrative hurdles. As well as the imminent application for observer status from the UK, France and Italy are also considering similar moves. Norway should soon progress from observer to full member status, and negotiations are under way in almost all other European countries.

CLARIN-PLUS

CLARIN will receive a major funding boost in the next few years, with the news that the CLARIN-PLUS proposal has been successful and is moving to the grant agreement preparation stage. CLARIN-PLUS offers extra resources to accelerate and extend the construction of the CLARIN infrastructure, including strengthening the central hub, and spreading the reach of CLARIN to more countries and to more users. CLARIN-PLUS will be funded as part of the INFRADEV-3 scheme in Horizon2020, a closed call for ERICs in the implementation phase. The start date is September 2015, and the programme of work includes numerous opportunities for CLARIN-UK consortium members, including workshops on how to create a CLARIN centre, and how to integrate your tools and data.

CLARIN ERIC in Horizon2020

As well as the major success of CLARIN-PLUS, CLARIN ERIC has been successful in a number of Horizon2020 proposals, including LT-Observatory and Parthenos, and a number of further proposals have been made or are in preparation. As soon as UK has joined CLARIN, we will be able to start to participate in these opportunities.

The rules for participation in Horizon2020 allow an ERIC to participate as a consortium member, on terms not available to most other types of participant. The ERIC can assign project work to individuals in universities and other bodies in member countries. This is already working well to significantly reduce the administrative overhead usually associated with forming a consortium involving all participating institutions as partners. Furthermore, as an European extra-national organization, CLARIN counts as an ‘extra country’ where the funding scheme rules prescribe that at least three different European countries are required.

CLARIN Centres Meeting Utrecht 28-29 May

CLARIN-PLUS will offer beginners’ workshops in various aspects of using and developing CLARIN services. If you are keen to dive in at the deep end now, there is a meeting for CLARIN Centres and those wishing to set up centres next month in Utrecht. Sessions include a webservices workshop, and a tutorial for those setting up a CLARIN centre. There is no CLARIN funding available for travel and subsistence, but there is no fee for participation. More details here.

Find out more about about CLARIN at http://www.clarin.eu/.