We are pleased to announce that Switzerland will join CLARIN as an observer from 1 January 2023, with a commitment for three years. The Swiss consortium CLARIN-CH was founded in December 2020 and consists of a growing number of Swiss academic institutions.
In early 2022, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) evaluated CLARIN-CH in order to consider the strategic importance of Switzerland’s affiliation to CLARIN
. CLARIN and CLARIN-CH received the highest grade in this evaluation. In their report, the SNSF said that CLARIN-CH’s participation in the CLARIN consortia is of high strategic relevance. With its broad user base, CLARIN offers access to highly innovative, international and interdisciplinary networks of research communities, working with language related data. CLARIN-CH will strengthen the international cooperation of SSH in Switzerland and provide structural synergies that have been missed so far. Following the recommendation of the SNSF, the State Secretary for Research, Education and Innovation decided to include CLARIN in the 2023 Swiss Roadmap for Research Infrastructures (July 2022) and requested the affiliation of Switzerland to CLARIN ERIC (November 2022).
With the start of Switzerland’s observership in early 2023, various Swiss resources will be shared within CLARIN by adding them to the Resource Families pages as well as the SSH Open Marketplace. To develop the national infrastructure, the CLARIN-CH consortium has a partnership with the Linguistic Research Infrastructure LiRI, which will go through the certification process to become a CLARIN B-centre, and with SWISSUbase and the Language Repository of Switzerland LaRS, which is the Swiss FAIR-repository for linguistic data. In addition, CLARIN-CH cross-institutional working groups are currently being set up, with the purpose of bringing together expertise on a specific topic and serving the community, either scholarly and technical.
CLARIN-CH is hosted by the Zurich Center for Linguistics. Its operational governance is ensured by Prof. Dr. Marianne Hundt (UZH) as National Coordinator, Prof. Dr. Anita Auer (UNIL) as President of the Consortium and Dr. Cristina Grisot (UZH) as Scientific Coordinator. The representing entity will be the State Secretary for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), with Katharina Eggenberger appointed to represent Switzerland as observer at the General Assembly meetings.