Shelter in scholarship: Evidence from a global survey of hosts for displaced Ukrainian scientists

In response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the global scientific community launched a range of support offers for displaced Ukrainian scientists. This paper examines the characteristics of these offers that attracted the most interest from Ukrainian scholars. We conduct a survey of hosts offering 2416 support opportunities registered in the #ScienceForUkraine database (22.3% participation rate). 56.9% support offers received at least one eligible application and 47.4% helped at least one Ukrainian scientist. Our analysis reveals that scholarships were more in demand than academic positions, joint applications for funding, or access to resources, and that offers connected to the Humanities were more popular than other disciplines. For hosts, solidarity was the primary motivation to offer help, and the availability of suitable funding was the second most common reason. Focusing on future policy design, our findings imply that support programmes for displaced scientists play a role in motivating hosts to help refugee scholars, and that these programmes should emphasise flexibility and consider the disciplinary composition of the affected academic community. • Reports of a survey among academic hosts of help offers for Ukrainians. • Questions included motivations, distribution channels, number of applications received and Ukrainians assisted. • Results are discussed and compared with recent and historic emergency responses of the academic community. • Possible causes for observed patterns (high effectiveness of offers in Humanities as well as Scholarship offers) are discussed.