Die vollständige Massenvolltextdigitalisierung aller historischen Drucke aus dem Zeitraum des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts mit Verfahren der Optical Character Recognition (OCR) stellt eine besondere technische und organisatorische Herausforderung dar. Daher fördert die DFG ein Koordinierungsprojekt zur Weiterentwicklung von OCR-Verfahren (kurz OCR-D), um in Kollaboration von Wissenschaft und Infrastruktureinrichtungen dieser Herausforderung zu begegnen. Auf der Basis der organisatorischen, technischen und inhaltlichen Vorbereitungen von OCR-D folgt nun eine Ausschreibung zur Entwicklung kreativer, innovativer, skalierbarer und optimierender Verfahren der Text- und Strukturerkennung im Rahmen des OCR-D-Funktionsmodells für die Volltextdigitalisierung historischer Drucke.

The partners for the Open Research Area in Europe (ORA) are pleased to announce their fifth joint call for proposals due to open spring 2017. In this call, JSPS, the Japanese core national funding organisation, will again collaborate with ORA as an associate partner. Applicants to the ORA call are encouraged to seek partnerships with Japanese researchers. JSPS will open a specific call for Japanese researchers. Japanese projects associated with the ORA proposals will be encouraged to submit proposals to this call for funding. Further information will be provided with the upcoming call for proposals.

Biodiversity is rapidly declining and the frequency and strength of environmental changes (e.g. climate and land-use change) is increasing. A diminished biodiversity may increase the sensitivity of ecological systems, such as individuals, populations, communities and food webs, to environmental changes, which may lead, in turn, to a further decline in biodiversity. The Priority Programme aims to improve our understanding of this important but severely understudied feedback loop by accounting for the biodiversity-related flexibility of ecological systems arising from, e.g., genetic, phenotypic, or species diversity, which enables them to adjust to altered conditions and thus influences their dynamics. Research proposals for the second three-year funding period are now invited.