One question we get asked frequently in the Research Office is what sources of funding are available to fund international travel for research purposes. Often travel costs can be included as part of a larger research grant. For example, a bid to a Research Council will usually include travel costs to disseminate research at conferences and so forth.

There are, however, plenty of other smaller pots of funding available for short-term travel in support of a research project – or perhaps to attend a conference overseas.

URO’s list of delicious bookmarks is a good place to start looking. Delicious is a social bookmarking website which allows users to store links online and – crucially – tag them with relevant keywords so they can be found later. It’s free to sign up for an account and you can even integrate it with certain browsers (like Firefox) to use as your default way of saving links. You can use delicious to save links about any topic you like; we use it to catalogue and organise funding opportunities available on the web.

To use URO’s delicious site to find funding opportunities related to travel, simply go to our delicious home page and type “travel” in the tag box:

As you type it will suggest possible tags and show you how many links have been saved using that tag. Alternatively, follow this link to go straight there: http://delicious.com/researchoffice/travel

At the time of writing we’ve saved 80 bookmarks related to travel funding. You can narrow the search further by clicking on one of the related tags on the right hand side of the screen:

I usually try to include information about what the funding opportunity covers in the description, as well as the deadline if applicable. Other tags typically include the funder, country the funding is aimed at, and discipline. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed which will keep you up to date with any new travel-related funding opportunities saved by URO: Just click here.

If you still can’t find what you’re looking for, you could try ResearchResearch.com. This site includes a comprehensive database of all funding opportunities. Once you’ve logged in (or chosen campus access), just click on the Funding tab on the left, then Funding Search:

Either search full text for “travel”, or search by “award type” > “travel for research purposes”. You can narrow your search by adding another criterion to restrict results which only apply to a certain discipline, for example.