CLARIN Resource Families Project Funding

Introduction

In the context of the CLARIN Resource Families initiative and the recently launched work plan for the coordination and support for improving the curation of the CLARIN Resource Families, CLARIN is welcoming Expressions of Interest (EoI) for small projects that contribute to this initiative with three to six person months (PMs) per project. 

The funding procedure is designed to be as flexible as possible, and therefore, much is left to the imagination and initiative of proposers and to the discretion and judgment of the assessment panel. However, the expressions of interest should clearly describe how the proposed project will tangibly and permanently contribute to the CLARIN Resource Families initiative.

The activities envisaged for this call include but are not limited to:

• Creation of one or more new resource family overview, following the same principle of the existing ones (this activity will be conducted in collaboration with the CRF Task Force)
• Comprehensive metadata curation of one or more resource families (this activity will be conducted in collaboration with the CRF Task Force)
• Extension of an existing family with an additional resource or tool to better support comparative research in the social sciences and humanities (SSH)
• Enhancement of an existing tool set to support additional languages
• Harmonisation of a resource family (e.g. by harmonising the heterogeneous annotation schemas or encoding formats within a resource family)
• Enrichment of an existing resource family with an additional annotation layer valuable for SSH researchers
• Extension of the ParlaMint model to another resource family (e.g., newspaper corpora).

Assessment Criteria

• The expressions of interest should include a description of:
  • How the outcome of the proposed development will address the requirements of users in SSH and beyond
  • The potential added value for the CLARIN target audience(s) beyond the current state-of-the-art
  • How the outputs of the project will contribute to interoperability and better integration in the CLARIN infrastructure
• The expressions of interest should clearly describe how the proposed project will tangibly and permanently contribute to the CLARIN Resource Families initiative
• Soundness of timeline and budget, qualifications of the development team involved
• Description of the project outputs, explanation of the overall strategic significance of the proposed development, and awareness of relevant standards and methodologies.

Application procedure

• This is a continuous call. Once the funding available for a specific year has been exhausted, a notification will be posted on this web page. All applications that have not been assessed by then will be assessed in the following funding round (if applicable)
• The proposer sends this application form by email to resource-families@clarin.eu. (In view of the flexible nature of this call, applicants are encouraged to send in a project idea before formal submission, in order to allow CLARIN Office to give additional guidelines and assess the eligibility of plans)
• For each EoI, an ad hoc assessment panel (consisting of representatives of CLARIN’s Board of Directors and the National Coordinators’ Forum) will be installed to select proposals that have sufficient quality to justify funding. The panel could call in additional expertise where they feel that would be needed
• Should more proposals than can be funded be received, the quality criterion, the potential for impact and the coverage of languages will become decisive in the comparison. We reserve the right to carry any remaining funds over to a next funding round in the event of an insufficient number of high-quality submissions
• EoIs will be assessed within three weeks upon receipt, and in principle the proposals will be processed in the order in which they were received. Once the available budget is exhausted, a notification will be posted on this web page. 

Eligibility of Proposers and Cost Categories

• The proposer should be affiliated with an institution that is part of a CLARIN consortium in a CLARIN member or observer country, or a CLARIN centre. In case the structure of a national consortium is not in place yet, or not specified unambiguously, proposers should check with the National Coordinator whether he/she can support the EoI
• All personnel costs are eligible for funding: net salary plus any related employer’s charges and any other component of the gross salary, as well as justified costs for support from student-assistants. Some other type of costs could be considered eligible if well  motivated as essential for the project. However, indirect costs or overhead costs, equipment, purchase of other goods, works and services are not eligible
• Size of funding /duration per proposal:
  • Maximum costs: budget for up to six person months
  • Maximum duration: 10 months.
• In order to minimise the administrative overhead, by default no more than two persons can be funded on a project. In case a proposer wants to propose a team of more than two people to work on the project budget, this should be motivated and approved by the CLARIN Office (clarin@clarin.eu) before submitting the proposal. 

Terms and Conditions

A blog post about the project and its outputs that is suited for publication on the CLARIN

European Research Infrastructure Consortium

See: https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/strategy/strategy-2020-2024/our-digital-future/european-research-infrastructures/eric_en

read more

website should  be submitted within two months after the end of the project.  Please follow guidelines for the blog structure. Be sure to enrich the blog post with the relevant hyperlinks (persons, organisations, projects, videos, materials) and any suitable photos.

Financial Procedure

The main proposer is responsible for assembling all cost claims relevant for the project. By accepting the grant, proposers agree to provide any underlying documentation for the costs charged to CLARIN ERIC on request. For the payment of personnel costs, several models could be used, including direct invoicing or secondment. (Please contact the  financial officer at CLARIN ERIC in case of questions.) On request, a prepayment by CLARIN ERIC can be issued up to a maximum of 60% of the total project budget. Together with the blog post, a final summary of expenses claimed (budget breakdown) will have to be sent to the financial officer at CLARIN ERIC before the last batch of the funds can be transferred. The cost summary is due within two months after the end of the project.

Guest Blog Posts

Read about the funded projects in the blog posts below:

Voices from Ravensbrück Project  The project aims to introduce a new type of corpus into the CLARIN Resource Family tree: a multilingual corpus of interviews curated and stored in a sustainable manner. Blog post