Shrink the paper or pay for extra page charges? A PhD student has started his research about two year ago by research scholarship from university. His supervisor won a huge grant on a topic very close to his research project couple of months earlier. He and his supervisor submitted a 6 page paper to a journal for publication. Editor's decision is that the paper should be published as a communication rather original research. This means that they have to reduce the manuscript to 4 pages or pay about 500$ for extra pages. The adviser asked the student to shrink the paper to the shortest possible version.

I have the following questions:


Can they pay the publications fees from the grant budget?
Can student ask the adviser to pay for the publication from the grant? What is the best polite approach for such request?
Should supervisor expect to put the grant number in the acknowledgement while he does not pay for the publication fees.
You already have the answer from your advisor. He is the one who knows the circumstances and can make the call if he want to. 
You can ask, but be careful how you do it. Remember, if he wanted to do it, he would have done it already instead of asking you to cut the paper.
Yes, if its close enough, and he feels that grant has been supporting his activities...