Benjamin Pope

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Benjamin Pope

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.

Any amendment to the ARC Act should emphasise the fundamental importance of basic research. I do not have a view on the specific wording, but the Discovery program is in my view much more important than the Linkage as a unique capacity of the ARC.

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.

I do not have a strong view on the Board proposal, but it must be stressed that the NIT and the corresponding potential for the CEO or Minister in vetoing peer-recommended research should be abolished.

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?

The College of Experts is valuable and should certainly be maintained; I do not have specific views on the language in the Act regarding this or related issues.

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.

It certainly should. The peer-recommended proposals should be accepted without arbitrary intervention by the Minister, CEO, or anyone else. It must be a gut-wrenching experience to know that for political reasons your career has been upended to score points in a slow news cycle, in a way that would be intolerable in any other sphere of the Australian economy. Furthermore, even where it is not used to justify intervention by the minister, the NIT should be abolished, and the process of "NIT-picking" (asking for revisions of the NIT, sometimes repeatedly) is a needless waste of the valuable time of researchers and research offices. It contributes to an atmosphere of hostility towards research, which is felt repeatedly in the ARC application process where stressing narrow "national interest" is encouraged even in the body text of proposals, where frankly in a lot of cases the justifications you have to give for a narrow, Australia-focused short-term economic interest of basic research are tortuous and clearly seen to be hollow by writers and reviewers. The process is seen to be a high-stakes stressful charade. Furthermore, the opaque process by which NITs are assessed and chosen for NIT-picking leads to fervent speculation as they come through - is this an indication the proposal is highly ranked? Is it a band sign that my proposal was not NIT-picked? This is in comparison to tight and effective application processes I have experience with in other contexts, for example the short science-focused proposals for NASA fellowships in the US, in which science is assumed to have a social license and resources are not wasted frivolously like this.

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 quite like the Aotearoa New Zealand approach to formal "critic and conscience" protections for academics. Perhaps we should copy that here!

I am troubled by the recent tendency to want to route funding through defence, and focus on "national interest" geared towards specific key industries like mining. This tends to undermine the social license of science, when (for instance) marginalized communities and Indigenous groups often rightly perceive scientists to be looking to extract narrow value at their expense. While the approach that has been taken to this in recent years maybe sells science to the big end of town, I actually think it tends to erode the social license for science, which is all the more critical today when (for example) vaccine skepticism is a major cause of social harm and conflict.

The general public love science, engage consistently with science journalism and science outreach, and science students at university tend to be motivated by a love of science and technology - and then encounter expensive degrees and miserable job prospects. Rather than distorting the Discovery program or shifting ARC funding to Linkage, I really do think we can maintain and extend the social license by funding and publicly promoting blue skies research, and rely on other parts of government to apply systems of taxation, subsidy, and regulation conducive to private sector R&D.

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

ARC processes are significantly more burdensome than processes that I have experienced and that I am aware of from my colleagues. As mentioned elsewhere in my submission, the NIT and the associated "Benefit" material in the body of a proposal is unnecessary. But this is just the beginning. Where in other contexts a short-form CV is the norm, the lengthy and idiosyncratically-formatted ROPE is bloated beyond what is useful in assessing a proposal. It is a barrier to involving international PIs, as nobody outside of Australia has material ready in this format.

The body text (D2 in DP/DECRAs) is itself strangely formatted; the "Project Quality & Innovation", "Feasibility", and "Benefit" sections do not map straightforwardly onto what scientists normally think of in terms of topics, methods, and expected results, and again have a tone that says: you do not deserve success; justify this in the most stringent and narrow terms to a hostile non-scientist. Finally, while budgets are important in some sorts of proposal - where hardware or other itemized products are the thrust of the project - many proposals simply request salary for the proposer (fellowships) or a postdoc (DP) plus travel expenses. Fully specifying year by year an itemized budget where travel is concerned - which conferences, when - could be more efficiently replaced with a national flat rate for employees and travel, with only other or special expenses to be separately justified.

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.

Speaking from my own experience, the most prominent early-career fellowship scheme in astronomy is the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (I was lucky enough to be awarded one of these, the Sagan Fellowship, in 2017). Researchers from all over the world compete for a flat-rate salary with flat-rate travel expenses, with a short 3-4 page science proposal, CV, and letters of reference. I have also been fortunate enough to be awarded a DECRA, in the DE21 round. It is probably fair to say that it took me at least 5 times as long to write the DECRA, and twice as long to be informed of the outcome, even though the monetary amounts are similar. I struggle to convince overseas collaborators from top international universities to apply for Australian fellowships, except when they have family reasons like Australian heritage or partners: the proposal cannot be easily adapted from the same materials they would use elsewhere, the timeframe of application and award are out of sync with the rest of the world, and the resources on offer are no better than anywhere else. If we want to better place Australia on the map for international researchers, I would recommend very significantly streamlining DECRA & Future fellowships - and actually, while we're at it, renaming the DECRA to be something recognisable to international applicants. Fixed deadlines communicated well in advance for both submission and for announcements would be important in providing certainty to applicants facing a difficult choice between multiple offers.

At the same time, the conditions attached to successful grants are not competitive with the best international alternatives: just today at the time of writing, two of my collaborators have been awarded Royal Society URFs in the UK and Ireland, offering eight years of fellowship with a very hefty sum of 90k/yr research expenses. The better ERC grants offer similarly impressive outcomes. Compare this to my most recent experience of a DP: almost all items in the budget cut arbitrarily, to a point that the awarded funds do not cover by themselves a postdoc for a full 3 year term. Nobody wants a 2 year postdoc, and we will struggle to compete for good candidates unless we can offer security. Flat rate grant awards with guaranteed budget locked in at the time of application would provide certainty and security.

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 do not believe that a "highly rigorous" impact assessment exercise is likely to be beneficial to Australian science. Compare the discourse around the REF in the UK; a system of extremely high stakes and laborious assessment which eats up an enormous amount of researchers' time, and more importantly distorts the hiring and funding landscape: people are hired or fired in sync with REF deadlines in order to optimize universities' submissions, rather than according to the natural life cycles of research or fair assessments of the researchers' individual circumstances. In my view, the best way of managing research is the peer review process of grants and publications, and democratic feedback from researchers into how processes in the grant writing and administration cycle do or do not work. Otherwise, bibliometric or other coarse assessments introduce incentives that distort the ordinary processes of science.

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?

I don't know that assessment per se is especially important here in demonstrating the importance of Australian research: what will demonstrate excellence to potential end users is reliable and consistent funding, delivered on time, with a minimal administrative burden. Researchers and end-users of research are more than aware of the ins and outs of their own industries, and are tied up by red tape.

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?

The ARC is deeply important to the Australian future, and any improvements to its processes will yield rewards for Australian society. It is important to approach this not with a view to justifying Australian science to a hostile government or public, but celebrating and supporting Australian science which will find its own ways to win public confidence.

Submission received

14 December 2022

Publishing statement

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