Anonymous #20

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Anonymous #20

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.

The purpose of the ARC Act needs to better reflect the implied meaning of 'Discovery'. That is, it must emphasize that pure basic (fundamental) research can be supported on the basis of research quality without necessarily delivering 'translational' or 'applied' benefits.

One important shortfall of the Discovery scheme, for example, is that assessors are asked to judge the 'Benefit' of a particular project, while applicants must explicitly list priority areas and choose SEO codes that address (mostly) applied outcomes. If the Act were to explicitly acknowledge the purpose of supporting high quality pure fundamental projects on research merit alone, assessors and applicants would not face the burden of having to seek specific economic, societal or cultural benefits that may not be obviously apparent at the time of writing.

The balance of research funding is also strongly biased against fundamental (Discovery) research. Yet almost every technological advance in the past 100 years has been predicated on pure basic research (think GPS technology, the internet, medical advances including the development of vaccines, etc.). The societal and cultural benefits of basic research are also enormous. Our understanding of the cosmos, biodiversity, and the environment has been enriched by curiosity-driven basic research. Let's not lose sight of this.

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.

A new governance model that establishes a Board comprising a range of skills, experience and perspectives relevant to the ARC would be useful in providing transparent oversight and guidance to the CEO. Such a board would also be helpful in appointing suitably qualified members of the College of Experts that encompass the broad of research activities supported by the ARC.

Q3. How could the Act be improved to ensure academic and research expertise is obtained and maintained to support the ARC?

How could this be done without the Act becoming overly prescriptive?

While I understand the need for a College of Experts, I do not think that the present model provides a transparent mechanism for understanding funding decisions. I know many researchers who have received overwhelmingly positive assessments for their proposals which ultimately are not funded, and my suspicion is that funding decisions are too strongly dependent on the CoE rankings, despite the fact that often there are gaps in expertise in the CoE (for example my own area of behavioural and evolutionary ecology has often not been represented on the CoE). Why then do we bother with expert peer review? CoE members might better serve as arbitrators (as can often be the case with journal editors), possibly discounting some poorly justified assessments and providing expert evaluation where this is reasonable.

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.

Ministerial discretion MUST be eliminated. Funding decisions should NEVER be political or subject to the whims of a particular politician. They should be guided by expert peer review and subject to ethical and other restrictions specified in the ARC Act.

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

I simply do not understand the need for a National Interest Test when it comes to supporting high quality fundamental research as this is ALWAYS in the national interest. The benefits of the research should be self-evident from the proposal. I think a 'summary of outcomes/impact' statement might be more suitable. Every civilized nation should support scientific research, and researchers, by virtue of the fact that they have been deemed by their peers as worthy of support (and to the extent that the research itself is both within the remit of ARC funding and satisfies basic ethical thresholds) have a social license to conduct that research.

Again, we need to avoid the burden on researchers of having to anticipate 'benefits' that will arise from their work. History tells us that the most important benefits (societal, economic, cultural) are rarely apparent to the researchers actually carrying out the work.

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

There is so much redundancy in the ARC grant application process and this has huge implications for the administrative burden placed on applicants, assessors and members of the ARC. As an assessor, I am primarily interested in the broad quality of ideas presented (not the precise detail of how those ideas will be carried out), the quality and experience of the applicant, and a statement outlining research opportunities and possible career interruptions. Nothing else. Based on the track record of the applicant (this is perhaps less relevant for ECRs - see Q7), I am perfectly capable of judging whether the applicant has the necessary skills to carry out the work, and the extent to which they are able to design programs of research that will produce high quality outputs. On this basis, the proposal could be cut by half (indeed the Royal Society UK funds up to 10 years of postdoctoral research - URF scheme - on the basis of 1.5 pages of proposed research!). CVs could be limited the past 5-10 years and accompanied by a brief statement of research metrics, quality, esteem etc. and the ROPE section would be a concise statement of research opportunity and current workload splits.

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 ideas:

Offer a basic streamlined and low budget (e.g. $40K per year) funding scheme for research groups based on ongoing productivity. This would greatly reduce the number of applications from high quality but not necessarily world-leading researchers. It would also provide some security in terms of funding research assistants, lab consumables etc. and would greatly reduced the administrative burden on these researchers in terms of wasting several months per year writing grants that are unlikely to be competitive. See NSERC schemes in Canada where this sort of scheme applies.

Increase the relative funding towards ECR schemes (the current DECRA scheme is a joke as it is virtually out of reach for genuine ECRs recently emerged from PhDs). In short, bring back something similar to the previous APD scheme, although see responses above for how such a scheme could be streamlined). Such a scheme might call for a more detailed application than that envisaged in Q6 given the lack of prior experience on which applicants can be judged.

Consider 1-page EOIs (e.g. see Royal Society of NZ Marsden Scheme) where high quality applicants likely to be successful can be separated from the majority of proposals that would not be competitive. A 1-page EOI (effectively a vision statement with clearly articulated aims) accompanied by an abbreviated CV for all CIs/PIs (and optional statement of opportunities) would be sufficient.

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 short, no, or at least not one similar to the most recent ERA. If we do rely on research metrics, why allow the individual institutions to curate (and manipulate) their own statistics. Moreover, when such schemes are used to judge the overall quality of specific discipline areas in a given institution, that can have important ramifications for research funding decisions that should be based on the merit of the application not the institution in which the research will be conducted.

At best, we require an independent and largely automated mechanism to categorize and evaluate research sector quality that does not require any input from the interested parties. Automated data-driven approaches that draw on key words, research publication metrics, and discipline codes would be a much more transparent and equitable system on which comparisons among institutions can be made. Some provision for universities and their respective discipline areas to challenge outcomes may be envisaged in such a scheme.

Q9. With respect to the ARC’s capability to evaluate research excellence and impact:

(a) How can the ARC best use its expertise and capability in evaluating the outcomes and benefits of research to demonstrate the ongoing value and excellence of Australian research in different disciplines and/or in response to perceived problems?

(b) What elements would be important so that such a capability could inform potential collaborators and end-users, share best practice, and identify national gaps and opportunities?

(c) Would a data-driven methodology assist in fulfilling this purpose?

Again, as with Q8 I think a pragmatic data-driven methodology that can accurately and fairly evaluate research excellence should be made more widely available across other sectors. Universities, for example, are mostly publicly funded and it seems obvious that the public at large, including the private sector, research institutes, schools, NGOs, industry etc. should have a clear insight into the research strengths of ARC-funded institutions.

Submission received

06 December 2022

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