NSERC Alliance Grant Update

NSERC has some important updates regarding the Alliance Grants: 

1) Electronic communication of NSERC Alliance grants decisions 

Starting in June, NSERC will be communicating its decisions on Alliance grants electronically.

When a funding decision on an Alliance grant is rendered, the principal investigator will receive NSERC’s notifications of decisions and all other pertinent documents (e.g., terms and conditions, reviewer reports, message to applicant) through their individual SharePoint library. The onus will be on applicants to share NSERC’s decision with the partner organizations and any co-applicants.

To help keep the Research grant offices informed of the status of Alliance grants submitted within the fiscal year, reports listing NSERC’s decisions will be issued through the grants and scholarships administrative portal (GSAP) on a bi-weekly basis.

For your information, templates of the reports which will be available through GSAP are attached.

2) Updates to the NSERC Alliance grants terms and conditions 

We wish to remind you that the terms and conditions for Alliance grants have been updated in order to specify that NSERC will be requesting, from Alliance grant holders, the contact information of the students, fellows and other research trainees paid out of their Alliance grants. NSERC may contact the trainees to gather information for statistical and reporting purposes. Note that grantees have the obligation to inform trainees in this respect.

3) Updates to the NSERC Alliance grants reporting requirements

Our reporting requirements for Alliance grants will be streamlined in comparison to what we used to request for prior university partnerships programs. This will reduce the burden on the universities’ finance offices, on the researchers and on the partners.

In particular, yearly status reports will be done online and should take less than 10 minutes to complete through answering a few questions. For projects whose duration is of three years or more, one mid-term progress report would be requested. At the end of all projects, a final report will be requested.

We will provide you with more information on the reporting requirements as we get closer to the implementation stage.

NSERC will continue to notify you as new information on its grants become available.

Any questions, concerns, or issues can be sent to ors@sfu.ca for assistance

x