General Information about CLARIN ERIC
CLARIN is one of the Research Infrastructures that were selected for the European Research Infrastructures Roadmap by ESFRI, the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures. It is a distributed data infrastructure, with sites all over Europe. Typical sites are universities, research institutions, libraries and public archives. They all have in common that they provide access to digital language data collections, to digital tools to work with them, and to expertise for researchers to work with them. The CLARIN Governance and Coordination body at the European level is CLARIN ERIC. An ERIC is a new type of international legal entity, established by the European Commission in 2009. Its members are governments or intergovernmental organisations. Currently thirteen Members and one Observer constitute CLARIN ERIC.
The following thirteen countries are at this moment Members of CLARIN ERIC: Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Sweden. The other member is the Dutch Language Union, which is an intergovernmental body created by the Dutch and the Flemish government, responsible for the maintenance and promotion of the Dutch language. Norway participates in CLARIN ERIC as an Observer, with a view to joining as a full Member later on. More countries are expected to join in the near future. The goal is to cover all EU and Associated States, but third countries can also join CLARIN ERIC.
It is important to note that CLARIN ERIC’s main task is to build, operate, coordinate and maintain the CLARIN infrastructure, and it neither conducts nor funds research activities.
CLARIN ERIC was set up with financial support from the European Commission through the CLARIN Preparatory Phase Project (2008-2011), but is now entirely funded by the participating countries.
(This text was originally published on the CLARIN ERIC web site under a CC-BY 2.0 license.)