Guidelines - Pilot

Note: These guidelines are partially outdated and are currently edited for the next pilot call. New guidelines will be published in January 2023, the next call will be launched in February 2023. Stay tuned!

How to apply for a NFDI4Earth Pilot?

The aim of the Earth System Science Pilots in the NFDI4Earth is to contribute to a broad, sustainable, and innovative development of the consortium. Pilots serve, for instance, for requirements engineering in the different task areas. The extent of a pilot should not exceed 1 person-year.

• Proposals for pilots will be evaluated in an open review process. Both the proposals and the anonymous reviews will be made accessible. By submitting a proposal, you as PI agree to an open access evaluation of the proposal.
  
• Criteria for the evaluation of the pilots will be in equal parts (scored on a 5 points scale for each criterion):

• –
  Quality and Innovation (relevance beyond state-of-the-art) 
• –
  Feasibility (leveraging existing technologies)
• –
  Potential for engaging a broad user community (also potential for linking scientific users and information infrastructures)
• –
  Potential for integration into the NFDI4Earth (relevance to the NFDI4Earth as whole e.g. in terms of contributing to a measure like education, interoperability, archiving, and clearly addressing relevant aspects of the research data life cycle)

• It is important to note that the selected set of pilots must represent a broad range of disciplines within the Earth System Sciences. Hence, pilots may be selected that score a bit lower than others on the criteria mentioned above in order to cover a wider range of disciplines and interrelations.
• Submissions should follow the template below - text must contain proper references and links where appropriate.
• Pilots must be described as short as possible and not exceed 4 pages. However, we will not exclude anyone who does not exactly respect the constraints. But precise wording is what counts.

Note: If the submitted pilot proposal is successful, the applicant agrees

• that the PIs parent institution will be named as participant (with the PI as representative) of the NFDI4Earth,
• that a letter of commitment is provided in due time (due to DFG regulations the letter has to be signed by your institution),
  
• that the person submitting the pilot will support the proposal writing process as it will be requested by the NFDI4Earth editorial team

Also note: The submission is subject to a review process and does not guarantee any funding!