Anonymous #25

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Anonymous #25

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.

In my mind, the government has to accept that his role is not to help industries, but to push knowledge irrelevant of the possibility for the industries to turn that into profit. This means that the ARC should seek to fund all kind of researches, which importance are based on decennial reviews conducted by researchers (with no interferences from politicians) about the big questions of the moment.

Industries willing to pay for applied research should use THEIR money, not the money of the tax payers. This means that NO questions should be asked about social or economic outcomes, and this should not be in any case an assessment point of the merit of the grant requests.

The ARC should also have a greater role, by by-passing local despots. At the moment, most of the grants request a co-shared part, and some projects are killed because local heads are not interested into pushing several topics. This should not occur: new projects should be able to appear at random places. The ARC should fund 100% of the projects it select.

Lastly, the ARC should have a real review power. A lot of projects I've seen funded on the last rounds are "continuation projects". For instance, the OzGrav project (I'm part of it) is an ongoing project since now a lot of time. Still, Australia has not its gravitational detector, and to be honest is not such a large player in the field. Most of the ideas I'm seeing are old, and not really impactful. Some are outdated, because australians do not travel abroad in conferences ( this has a cost, and unfortunately is usually not well funded). The ARC should be able to critically assess the projects once completed and underperforming projects should be penalized when needed to allow new ideas to emerge.

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.

To be honest, the governance should be kept at the minimal level, AND should not take any decision.

It should be only administrative people, in charge of compiling numbers.

Each 2-3 years, a college of experts should be elected by their peers (no administrative/political nominee), who would take the decision of whom to fund, after reading all the proposals.

This college of expert should be elected for 1 term (no more), and this is all.

Most of all, nobody without a PhD should have any say.

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?

Just leave the academics run the ARC. We know how to do that, and in all countries where the politicians are able to refrain interfering with us, it works very well.

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, it should.

1) simply enact that nobody without a PhD (completed) can be part of the ARC will already help.
2) replace any Exec board by an elected college of expert.
3) make clear that the referee's opinions are the ones to be considered when deciding the fundings.

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

Force each funded project to create a poster and a webpage about the project. The poster would be displayed on the university campuses for student's information, and the webpage for the general public.

Ban those would don't provide the webpage for future applications.

Encourage public opening of the laboratories on specific dates.

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

This text should appear in bold, flashing, bright red font size 1000 on your screen:

remove the need to find partners and second/third level of funding before starting to fund a project.

If I have an idea, and if I can do it myself, I don't want someone else dragged into the project because this needs to be done to fulfill an administrative rule of the ARC.

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.

Remove all the stupid rules currently in place about co-funding and co-CIs, and let academics do their job. We love to travel and to go to conference for forging collaborations and partnerships, but we do that ONCE we have the money, not before !

Also, in the countries I've worked in (France, Italy, the USA), it is common to ask for 40% of the grant for publications and travel. How can we work if we don't have this money? I've funded my last travel to the USA by myself only because the ARC has not funded enough our last grant...

Note also that the USA NSF is more aware than the ARC about the reality, and allows for charging overheads requested by the universities, thus making the things more easy when asking for university support.

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?

I don't have experience on that, so I prefer not to comment.

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?

All of this relates to the expertise of the reviewers. Either the ARC trusts them, and the question is irrelevant, or it does not, and then the question is rather how to select experts to help the ARC.

On that, I think the simplest solution is just to elect the reviewers for a few years, and let the academics decide who is really an expert. But don't trust the auto-evaluation requested when submitting a proposal: Donald Trump was considering himself a wold expert in immunology, and I have some colleagues with such an ego that they are expert in nearly everything.

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 have been successful on one grant, but had no feedback of the final ranking. A colleague of mine was unsuccessful, and had to go to court to obtain some feedback.

In science, whatever can been said, if it is supported by some kind of argumentation. If the Panel cannot provide such basic item (a simple feedback) this means that its decisions are not based on any kind of merit, but only on who lobbied the most efficiently the panel.

This is the global view I have at the moment of the ARC: a politicized institution aimed at funding a population of (aging) happy few, which has lost his initial goal of funding australian research, and actively preventing new challenging ideas to grow in Australia.

This is a choice to be done: Australia can obviously continue on this path, and stay where it stands; or the ARC can be replaced by something like the NSF, the ERC, or the ANR (to cite only a few of the funding agencies around the world) in order to bring Australia higher.

Submission received

07 December 2022

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