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.

The ultimate objective of CLARIN ERIC is to advance research in humanities and social sciences by giving researchers unified single sign-on access to a platform which integrates language-based resources and advanced tools at a European level. This shall be implemented by the construction and operation of a shared distributed infrastructure that aims at making language resources, technology and expertise available to the humanities and social sciences (henceforth abbreviated HSS) research communities at large.

The CLARIN vision is based on the following eight pillars. 

1. Coverage: Eventually every scholar in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) in every EU and Associated country should have direct single sign on access for research purposes to every single digital data collection containing language based material owned or made available by public bodies.
2. Legal issues: No other restrictions on the use for research purposes should apply than those following from confidentiality, privacy or ethical considerations. The rights and legitimate interests of data owners should be protected at all times.
3. Integration of data: Metadata and content search should allow scholars to find data if it exists, and they should be able to build virtual collections of material originating from different sources in different countries, and use them as if they were all residing in the same place and using the same representation standards.
4. Integration of services: In addition to this scholars should have access to advanced language technology facilities (covering all modalities, such as text, speech, gestures) in the form of web services that allow them to annotate, explore, exploit, enhance, analyse, manipulate and visualize these data in order to support their research. Web services should be able to operate on data from various sources and should be easily combinable to complex chains and structures to perform complex operations.
5. Preservation: It should be possible to feed results of research projects as well as results obtained through application of services on data back into data collections in order for other researchers to use them. Data and results should be preserved in a sustainable way, and be provided with persistent identifiers to so that they can be retrieved later on to replicate results or conduct new research. In addition there should be persistent links to publications using or documenting the resources.
6. Ease of access: Scholars should be able to understand and exploit the facilities offered by CLARIN without technical obstacles.
7. Crossing borders: The CLARIN infrastructure should be embedded in the global research infrastructure landscape and should actively invite to crossing borders between disciplines, other infrastructures, countries and continents, as well as borders between academia and industry.
8. Sustainability: The infrastructure should be financially, technically and organisationally sustainable over a longer period of time, but at the same time open to changes taking place in the infrastructures landscape.