SHAREing is a Skills Hub for Accelerated Research Environments, funded through the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure Programme.
This Hub will administer flexible funding for identified work across 4 work packages. Individual awards will typically be in the range £5,000 - £25,000, with the total fund across the project at £1.6m.
For each call, the hub will issue a scope of work and eligibility criteria, based on the priorities identified during the term of the work.
Funding Categories
The fund is intended to support activities under the three categories below:Pioneer
- National accelerator assessment service
- Accelerator-focused assessment methodology
- Accelerator testbeds landing page
- Acceleration case studies
Realise
- Training pathways & offer overview
- Knowledge exchange
- Courses & workshop delivery
- Bi-directional pipeline with MSc and Industry
Lead
- Network with compute centres
- Liaise with vendors, industry and businesses
- Integrate outcomes into University KPIs
- International Collaborations
Funding Available
The SHAREing hub is able to support activities up to £2million Full Economic Cost (FEC).
The funding will be award at 80% FEC in line with UKRI funding rules, meaning that funds of £1.6million are available.
For each project awarded, the lead institution must be willing to provide the remaining 20% FEC and will be accountable for the conduct of the research, the use of public funds and for ensuring proper financial management of grants.
UKRI funding categories apply, with these exclusions – equipment and research software for desktop/institutional compute will not be funded.
Proposals must be led by a researcher or research technical professional based in an institution eligible to receive UKRI funding.
All applications will be reviewed and assessed by a panel. The panel members and assessment criteria will be announced for each call. Outcomes will be shared and an award agreement issued for successful applications, which must be signed and returned prior to commencement of work/commitment of funds.
Applications will be assessed based on:
- Fit to Hub priorities as outlined in the Task description
- Value for money
- Feasibility to deliver
The maximum expected values for each application are outlined in the table below:
| Example Activity Types | Indicative number of applications to be supported per call | Indicative/maximum award budget per application (80% values) |
|---|---|---|
| Workshops, Hackathons, Bootcamps | 4–6 | £5,000 |
| In-depth assessments of research codes | Up to 10 case studies | £15,000 |
| Creation of learning material (preferred e-learning) and development of methodologies/workflows | 6–10 | £25,000 |
Typically work is expected to commence within 2 months of confirmation of funding and complete within 5 months of confirmation. This schedule is subject to change due to changing project requirement.
All projects awarded under this scheme must be completed and fully invoiced by 28th February 2028.
Eligibility and Scope
Eligibility criteria and the scope of work will be announced via our website, which include our standard EDI principles.
Bids must be closely aligned to the tasks as outlined in the call specific guidance.
A long-term vision for SHAREing is that we want tasks to use a consistent methodology and appearance. Performance assessments should use similar methodological building blocks, training material similar didactic concepts, machine descriptions provide similar content. As we are just about to start, these methodologies are not written down anywhere yet - they might not even exist - and guidelines are not available. We hence would like bids in the future to make it clearer what methodology they plan to use, so the write-up of the methods itself can benefit from the work done.
For SHAREing, it is absolutely key that all mini projects contribute towards a joint, public body of work, i.e. webpages, public training material, success stories. Some bids could have pointed out more clearly how their deliverables will be made public and how they contribute towards SHAREing public-facing webpages, for example.
If a bid is about knowledge exchange comprising meetings, workshops, etc travel money is reasonable and important. Otherwise, SHAREing mini projects cannot fund it. As an example, requests for "conference attendance and outreach" is not fundable unless explicitly within the scope of the mini project. SHAREing will make explicit support funds for such activities available later.
Events and workshops will always be higher prioritised than individual travel: If a mini project has to conduct interviews or brainstorming sessions, we strongly encourage bids to think if these could culminate in official SHAREing events hosted at one of the partner sites, as these events help to increase SHAREing's visibility. In such a case, travel money obviously is available.
At this point in time, SHAREing budget is ringfenced, i.e. eligible RTPs have to be employed at a consortium partner and in the ideal case have a direct relation to one of the co-leads. However, collaborations with external partners are explicitly encouraged. If joint work is identified, we have to ensure that the funding is allocated for consortium member activity only. We plan to change this in later stages of the programme to allow funding of activity at non consortium members.
EDI Principles
Projects should encourage and support inclusive research practices and seek to engage underrepresented groups or communities. Following the recommendations of the N8 CIR EDI Recruitment Checklist.
- All work has a generous latest delivery time, but it is up to the project team how this deadline is best met (part-time, full-time, ...)
- Events and meetings organised as part of a Task are to be scheduled on workdays only, preferably in the mornings, such that school runs and childcare arrangements are not affected.
- All meetings shall be recorded and saved for a brief period of time so people can study the content later.
- Work is designed to be completed by RTPs without any micromanagement by senior management and academics.
- Constructive feedback on any unsuccessful project bid will be made available and project rankings will be published.
- The executive team will work towards short turnaround times to give colleagues freedom and security to plan.
- The assessment panel will consist of members from a range of role types and career seniority.