What is the GSS cIRcle Open Scholar Award?
The GSS and cIRcle have been partnering to provide the GSS cIRcle Open Scholar Award to UBC Vancouver graduate students since 2012. It is a lottery based award, and is awarded to four students every year: two at the end of the summer semester, and two at the end of the fall semester. Each award is worth $500. The deadline to participate in the upcoming draw is September 24th, 2015.
To be entered into the draw, students must deposit their exemplary non-thesis course work to the GSS cIRcle Open Scholar Award collection in cIRcle.
Am I eligible?
All UBC Vancouver graduate students, of all disciplines, are invited to participate in the collection and enter the draw for the award. All you need is your course instructor’s approval to submit your course work to the collection.
What can I deposit?
Any non-thesis course work is welcome. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Essays/papers
- Presentations (including posters)
- Video or Audio based projects
- Graduating projects or papers
- Authorized versions of published articles based on course-related research
The work should be considered exemplary, and your course instructor will need to approve the submission.
Why should I participate?
Winning the award aside, there are lots of benefits to archiving your graduate course work in cIRcle.
Firstly, it provides you with a permanent and professional copy of the work that you can share as part of your academic and professional portfolio. This helps you establish and grow your academic and professional profile.
Secondly, cIRcle is the number 1 digital repository in Canada. All of its content is Open Access and heavily indexed by search engines, including Google Scholar. Adding your content to the collection makes your work accessible to scholars around the world and helps disseminate your work. Items in the GSS cIRcle Award Collection are accessed hundreds, if not thousands of times. The most popular item in the collection is approaching 10,000 views.