Instructions for subprojects

After approval

When a subproject has been approved, the following actions will be taken.

• The project coordinator (and "penvoerder") receives an e-mail with confirmation.
• The project coordinator receives an official "toezeggingsbrief" with budget and deliverable list as apendixes. The "toezeggingsbrief" functions as a mini consortium agreement.
• The "toezeggingsbrief" must first be signed by the directors of the institutes that are partners.
• The "toezeggingsbrief" has to be sent to the CLARIN-NL office for a countersignature.

Start of the project

A subproject can officially start when the "toezeggingsbrief" is signed by the CLARIN-NL director.

• 75% of the project budget is transferred to the coordinator.
• The coordinator must forward proportional parts to the project partners.
• Projects will be assigned 3 "portefeuillehouders" (PF): 1 from the Executive Board and 2 from the National Advisory Panel. They monitor the progress of the project. It is important to keep the PFs informed! Invite them to the initial project meeting. See here for more information on the responsibilities of the PF and a list of the PFs for all subprojects.

During the project

If you have any questions or problems, please contact us.

Technical issues: HelpDesk (helpdesk@clarin.nl)

Financial/organizational issues: CLARIN-NL office (clarinnl@uu.nl)

Progress issues: EB PF

ISOcat issues: the ISOcat coordinator Ineke Schuurman

If, in the course of the project, it turns out that revision of the plan or budget is needed, the project coordinator is obliged to provide justification for this revision and to ask explicit permission from the CLARIN-NL EB. Any changes have to be included in an addendum to the ‘toezeggingsbrief’ or a revised ‘toezeggingsbrief’, which will be drafted by the CLARIN-NL office.

Every subproject has its own project work space (project area) on the CLARIN-NL website. All deliverables must be put at this project area. You can also use the project area to share project documents with other project participants.

CLARIN-NL wants to encourage project participants to involve other researchers in CLARIN-NL. Show colleague researchers what you are doing. Convince them that this is the way to go. You could for instance organize workshops. It is important to increase the interest from and involvement of humanities researchers that do not (yet) work with large digital sets of data and tools. CLARIN-NL will support disseminating events logistically and financially. A request for subsidy can be submitted here.

Intermediate report

If a project lasts longer than a year, it has to submit a progress report every half year. See below for a template for such reports. N.B.: this is only the case if the initial project plan covers more than a year. It does not apply to projects that take more than a year because of some delay.

End of project

What to do when a subproject is about to finish:

• All deliverables have to be uploaded on the project area of the relevant project on the CLARIN-NL website. If this is not possible for some deliverable (e.g. it is too big, it is a runninng system that only works on a particular server, etc), a link (URL, preferably a PID) to the deliverable must be uploaded. Please notify the CLARIN-NL office via clarinnl@uu.nl that you have uploaded the deliverables.

• A PDF-version of each publication/presentation made in connection with the project must be sent to the CLARIN-NL office. The exact bibliographic data about each such publication/presentation must be included in the technical/scientific report.

• A technical/scientific report must be made. The template for this report can be found below.

• A financial report, in fact multiple financial reports (one for each project partner) must be made. See below for a template and the procedure to fill such financial reports.

As soon as all the required documents and deliverables have been submitted to the CLARIN-NL office, the EB will evaluate them, and also the NAP “portefeuillehouders” will be asked to assess the results of the project. Once the deliverables and the technical/scientific report have been approved by the EB, the CLARIN-NL office will make up the final account (‘eindafrekening’). This will be made up as follows:

• For each person involved, the actual effort in person months as specified in the financial report will be multiplied by the budgeted amount per person month for this person, with a maximum of the originally budgeted total amount for this person.
• Any actually incurred travel and subsistence costs for each person will be included, with a maximum of the amount allowed in function of the actual effort of the relevant person.
• Any other costs for which explicit permission has been given in the ‘toezeggingsbrief’ or addenda to it will be included.
• Overspending of one person can be compensated by underspending of another person if they are from the same organisation, to the extent that the total amount is not higher than the original overall budget of this organisation.

No such compensation can be applied among different organisations, unless permission of the EB has explicitly been granted for this during the project and all partners in the project have agreed upon it in an addendum to the ‘toezeggingsbrief’ or a revised ‘toezeggingsbrief’.

The ‘eindafrekening’ will be sent to the project coordinator for comment but will be considered fixed if no response has been received within two weeks after the ‘eindafrekening’ has been sent out.Within 2 months after the ‘eindafrekening’ has been fixed, the CLARIN-NL office will transfer the remaining funding (‘eindbetaling’) to the project coordinator ("penvoerder"), who will promptly distribute it proportionally among the project partners in accordance with the ‘eindafrekening’. The partners in a project should NOT send invoices to the CLARIN-NL office.

For the Final and halfyearly reports please use the following templates:

• Technical/Scientific report
• Financial Report
• Halfyearly Report

Procedure for filling and signing the financial report(s):

• Every project partner fills out its own financial report, on the basis of its own financial administrative data. The report is signed by the head of finance of the project partner's organization.
• Since there will typically be multiple financial sheets per project, one for each project partner, make sure you fill in the correct value for "partner" in the first part of the form. For example, there are two partners in project A: MPI and UU. Then the MPI report has the value “MPI” for “partner” and the UU report has the value “UU” for “partner”.
• The project coordinator (and "penvoerder") fills out the same form as the other partners. However, the project coordinator’s form deviates at two points from forms of other partner(s). First of all, the project coordinator mentions in the first table (“Project Budget”) the budget for the whole project (to be copied from the appendix of the “toezeggingsbrief”). We recommend that the project coordinator fills out the first table. The second table (“Project Realisatie”) is filled out by the financial administration department. Secondly, the project coordinator also includes the amounts transferred to other partners under "Materiële lasten" with the item: "andere partners".
• Under the item “Materiële lasten” you mention the actual amounts for traveling expenses, other expenses and payments to other partners (the latter usually only relevant for the project coordinator, see previous bullet).
• If you want to, you can add to “Materiële lasten” items for the final payment to receive or to transfer to other partners (at the time you fill out the financial report, the project has only received 75% of the budget and the project coordinator has also paid only 75% to the other partners in the project). If you include items for the final payment, clearly keep them separate (since they are still to be paid or to be received instead of already being paid/received).
• If the project coordinator mentions the final payments still to transfer, the amounts have to match the amounts mentioned by the other partner(s) (but they may never be larger than the original budget). If a partner has spent less than the original budget, they get less in the final payment.
• As to costs for salaries: you can report for the salary costs either an amount based on the normative NWO-VSNU amounts, or the real costs (but do not include overhead) that you made, but (1) you will never be entitled to more than was originally budgeted, and (2) you will always maximally be entitled to receive the amounts according to the NWO-VSNU norms (per person month) multiplied by the number of person months actually worked.
• If you made more costs than covered by the funding (and thus made a financial contribution to the project), it is good to specify this in a separate item, to make it explicit. So mention the extra costs and also state an item “own contribution” as income, so that the total amount is precisely the original budget.
• For the project coordinator to be able to fill out the form, (s)he needs information from the other partners. That is why the project coordinator is the last one to fill out the form.
• The coordinator collects the financial reports from all partners, signs them and sends them to the CLARIN-NL office by normal mail and preferably also as a scanned file (PDF format) via e-mail.

In special cases a project can have a "resultaatsverplichting" instead of an "inspanningsverplichting" (which is the default). This has to be clearly arranged with the CLARIN-NL EB before the start of the project and should be reflected in de "toezeggingsbrief".