By Julian Dierkes, Associate Dean, Funding, G+PS
G+PS has long supported graduate students in their efforts to disseminate the results of their research by offering a one-time-per-degree $500 award to present at conferences. Few conferences are meeting in person at the moment, though we will also reimburse for registration costs for virtual presentations. But given pandemic circumstances and a move of academic culture away from in-person travel as a response to the climate emergency, students may be exploring alternative avenues to disseminate research results.
In response, we have opened our reimbursement to open access publishing fees and have renamed the fund “Graduate Student Travel and Research Dissemination Fund”. Colleagues in the Faculty of Arts will have received a recent announcement of the UBC Open Access Fund for Humanities and Social Sciences Research. We are heading in a similar direction with the Graduate Student Fund by offering reimbursement of article processing charges to all graduate students. This is still a one-time reimbursement up to $500 that students could select instead of reimbursement for travel.
However, we are leaving some details of reimbursement open. For example, how to handle application for reimbursement in multi-author situations, or whether faculty should generally be expected to fund article processing charges when they appear as co-authors. Rather than decide this centrally a priori, we are hoping to understand more about the context in which reimbursement for open access fees will be a benefit for graduate students and are therefore encouraging graduate students who are incurring costs for open access publishing to get contact me at julian.dierkes@ubc.ca with a description of the open access publishing experience and the fees that may have been involved to apply for reimbursement.