Professor Fleur Johns FASSA

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Professor Fleur Johns FASSA

Responses

Q1. How could the purpose in the ARC Act be revised to reflect the current and future role of the ARC?

For example, should the ARC Act be amended to specify in legislation:
(a) the scope of research funding supported by the ARC
(b) the balance of Discovery and Linkage research programs
(c) the role of the ARC in actively shaping the research landscape in Australia
(d) any other functions?

If so, what scope, functions and role?

If not, please suggest alternative ways to clarify and define these functions.

It would be beneficial for the reasons alluded to in the Consultation Paper to enshrine the purpose and authority of the ARC in legislation. If this is done, the overall legislative approach should be principled and enabling so that the ARC may respond to needs and priorities that emerge over time. In particular, the ARC Act should not be overly prescriptive about the balance of Discovery and Linkage or other research programs that the ARC supports and should allow for the creation of new programs without legislative amendment. Provided that the ARC’s governance arrangements are robust, the parliament should be able to place trust in the organisation to determine how best to serve its purposes, discharge its functions, and fulfil its responsibilities in a dynamic and competitive global research environment.

If something like the language on purposes set out in the Consultation Paper is introduced into the legislation, it would be good to see this legislative statement of purposes expanded to include reference to the role of the ARC in supporting: research collaboration both national and international; research training; and the development of world-class national research infrastructure. It would also be advisable to emphasise the ARC’s role in communicating and promoting public appreciation of the value of pure basic, strategic basic, and applied research.

Q2. Do you consider the current ARC governance model is adequate for the ARC to perform its functions?

If not, how could governance of the ARC be improved? For example, should the ARC Act be amended to incorporate a new governance model that establishes a Board on the model outlined in the consultation paper, or another model.

Please expand on your reasoning and/or provide alternative suggestions to enhance the governance, if you consider this to be important.

No. Reestablishment of an ARC Board along the lines set out in the Consultation Paper would be a positive step to improve ARC governance, safeguard ARC independence, and maintain public confidence in ARC processes and decision-making. The ARC Board should aspire to garner the level of public respect and independence of the Reserve Bank Board for instance, even though its policy-setting powers will of course be more modest. It would be especially valuable — for international benchmarking purposes and breadth of outlook — to have representation on the ARC Board of at least one person with recent, high-level experience in counterpart organisations elsewhere in the world such as one or more of those organisations represented in the Global Research Council (see https://globalresearchcouncil.org/about/governing-board/).

Q4. Should the ARC Act be amended to consolidate the pre-eminence or importance of peer review?

Please provide any specific suggestions you may have for amendment of the Act, and/or for non-legislative measures.

Yes, entrenching the primacy of peer review in proposal assessment in the ARC Act (for example, through revision of Section 53) would serve the purpose of ensuring research quality is assessed rigorously and appropriately and by reference to standards, expectations, and the current state-of-the-art in the relevant field. It would also help to maintain public confidence in the ARC. Although the Australian public may not have a good understanding of peer review, public trust in researchers (or at least in scientists) remains generally quite strong according to recent Pew surveys and there are some indications of public respect for academic experts having strengthened in the wake of the recent (and ongoing) pandemic. For these reasons, the public is likely to gain confidence from knowing that ARC-funded research is evaluated by peers rather than politicians.

Q5. Please provide suggestions on how the ARC, researchers and universities can better preserve and strengthen the social licence for public funding of research?

As noted above, the goals preserving and strengthening social licence for public funding of research would be well served by making ARC governance arrangements more robust and affirming of the independence of the ARC. The ARC could also work to maintain this social licence by expanding its role in communicating and promoting Australia’s research capabilities and research contributions publicly. Ultimately, social licence is unlikely to be strengthened by research plans oriented towards short-term impacts. The Australian public is mature and intelligent enough to value people who are working at the forefront of their field internationally regardless of the public's level of familiarity with current work in the field in question.

Q6. What elements of ARC processes or practices create administrative burdens and/or duplication of effort for researchers, research offices and research partners?

The preparation of lengthy research applications for funding schemes with low success rates represents significant wasted effort on the part of Australian researchers and the processing of such applications imposes fruitless burden on ARC staff and assessors. To alleviate this burden, the ARC should consider broader use of Expression of Interest processes and threshold assessment to improve success rates for fully developed applications. A further option worth considering, to alleviate administrative burden associated with reducing the pool of potentially fundable proposals, could be lottery-based award of funding. This might entail randomly allocating funding among proposals that meet a certain threshold and are considered fundable in principle. I note that the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Health Research Council of New Zealand have both experimented with such mechanisms for allocating funding.

Q7. What improvements could be made:

(a) to ARC processes to promote excellence, improve agility, and better facilitate globally collaborative research and partnerships while maintaining rigour, excellence and peer review at an international standard?

(b) to the ARC Act to give effect to these process improvements, or do you suggest other means?

Please include examples of success or best practice from other countries or communities if you have direct experience of these.

Other changes that the ARC might consider, in addition to those suggested above, by way of process improvements include:

- issuing targeted, thematic calls for research in certain areas, alongside the usual general, open call funding schemes, much as the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, the Agence Nationale de la Recherche in France, and the Research Council of Norway all do (among other research funding agencies); and

- permitting more meaningful funding for international collaboration to be built into all grant schemes and/or establish dedicated schemes to fund international collaborative research, either in the ARC’s own right or through a greater array of bilateral or multilateral co-funding agreements. If it is to meaningfully support international research collaboration, funding of this kind should go beyond covering the cost of having Australian-based researchers undertake short-term travel abroad and/or foreign collaborators undertake short-term visits to Australia. For instance, in appropriate circumstances it should be permitted to fund or co-fund the salaries of staff working outside Australia in the employ of a non-Australian university or research institute as part of an international research collaboration. See, for example, the Swiss National Science Foundation’s International Co-Investigator Scheme. Note, also, that some UK Research and Innovation grants allow principal investigators to be based outside the UK. Consider, furthermore, the range of international and collaboration-oriented grants awarded by the Social Science Research Council in the US, such as the Social Science Research Council’s Transregional Collaboratory.

Q8. With respect to ERA and EI:

(a) Do you believe there is a need for a highly rigorous, retrospective excellence and impact assessment exercise, particularly in the absence of a link to funding?

(b) What other evaluation measures or approaches (e.g. data driven approaches) could be deployed to inform research standards and future academic capability that are relevant to all disciplines, without increasing the administrative burden?

(c) Should the ARC Act be amended to reference a research quality, engagement and impact assessment function, however conducted?

(d) If so, should that reference include the function of developing new methods in research assessment and keeping up with best practice and global insights?

In the absence of a link to funding, and in view of the enormous administrative burden it imposes, I do not believe that there is a compelling case for continuation of the ERA or EI.

Q10. Having regard to the Review’s Terms of Reference, the ARC Act itself, the function, structure and operation of the ARC, and the current and potential role of the ARC in fostering excellent Australian research of global significance, do you have any other comments or suggestions?

I would simply like to note, by way of background, that these comments pertain especially to the role of the ARC in fostering research of global significance and enabling and supporting international research collaboration. This leverages my expertise as a Professor of international law at UNSW Sydney, my familiarity with leading research institutions outside Australia, and my role as International Secretary and Chair of the International Committee of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (although I should stress that the views that I express here are my own and not necessarily those of my university or the Academy).

Submission received

24 November 2022

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