This Economic and Social Research Council funding opportunity aims to launch a series of pilot solutions and approaches which address some of the current and future data service delivery challenges as identified through the Future Data Services strategic review. These pilots should demonstrate how these challenges could be resolved, evaluate how effective they are, and how they could be scaled up with additional funding from April 2025 onwards.

The challenges that the pilots and approaches should address fall into the following themes:

• federation of data services
• data discovery using machine learning or other AI technologies
• increasing skills capacity for data service professionals

Funding is also provided by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Digital Research Infrastructure programme. As such, pilots should be designed to answer data service challenges across the broader UKRI research infrastructure landscape, using a cross-disciplinary approach. Findings from pilots should support the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure programme objectives.

• You must be based at a UK research organisation eligible for Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funding.
• The total fund for this funding opportunity is £2.6 million at 80% full economic cost (FEC). The FEC of your project can be between £150,000 and £1,000,000. We will fund 80% of the FEC.
• Projects can begin in April 2024 but must be completed by 31 March 2025.
• The grant is currently open, and the closing date for submissions is the 22nd of February 2024, 4:00pm UK time.

Click here for more information on how to apply.