Anonymous #42

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Anonymous #42

Responses

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.

I do not know if it is supported by data, but I think one common perception of ARC funding is that people who have received ARC funding in the past tend to be more successful in obtaining new ARC funding. If it is true, perhaps it just means people doing good research being consistently funded. However, another possibility is that the current peer-review system introduces a systemic bias through which past recipients of ARC funding are consciously or unconsciously favoured.

In the current peer-review system, members of the College of Experts have a very strong influence on funding decisions. Because the College of Experts members are typically past recipients of ARC grants, it is inevitable that they are inclined to favour proposals from researchers who have been successful in obtaining ARC funding—that is, generally, people have the propensity to think favourably of other people who share certain characteristics with themselves (similar-to-me effect, or in-group bias). Furthermore, favouring the past recipients would eventually benefit the College of Experts members because they also received ARC funding in the past, so by maintaining the system in which past recipients are advantaged, the College of Experts members can increase their own chance of securing another ARC grant in the future.

Two suggestions for addressing this issue, if this issue actually exists:
1. In the peer-review system, researchers who have not been successful in obtaining ARC funding can be involved. For example, the College of Experts can have a section in which experts have been independent of ARC, and these experts are given the same degree of power as experts who have been funded by ARC.

2. The power of making funding decisions can be distributed among multiple people, instead of giving a large part of it to a single College of Experts member. If these multiple people can include those who have been independent of ARC, that may be even more effective.

(One more suggestion is to allocate a certain proportion of funding to researchers who have not received ARC funding in the past, but this suggestion may not be relevant in the context of this question, which is about peer-review.)

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

ARC and universities should do a lot more for explaining the long-term value of academic research to the general public. Sometimes people are too hasty in judging the value of research—that is, they tend to judge its value by thinking what it brings to them 'here and now'. On the other hand, often, the kinds of academic research funded by ARC are focused on longer-term goals. Because of this, it may be difficult for the general public to understand why their tax money has to be spent on research projects that may seem to have no relevance to them.

A good example in this regard might be given by research on CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats - a family of DNA sequences), which initially was a purely academic endeavour but ended up being very much relevant to life and well-being of people (because it formed the basis for a new gene-editing technique, through which many new medical treatments have been proposed). If the initial academic phase of this research had not been funded, the revolutionary gene-editing technique would not have come out. And governmental agencies like the ARC are often the only funding bodies that can provide funding to such basic, not-for-(immediate)-profit research. ARC and universities can collaborate more to publicise a story like this (although this particular example is not Australian).

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

The rejoinder process could be simplified. Currently, all applicants are requested to submit a rejoinder, but if it is clear that after the initial assessment their applications do not have any reasonable chance of getting funded, they could have been notified of this so that they would not waste their time for developing rejoinders.

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?

Multiple categories of funding could be created within each scheme. For example, often, the kind of research I do is well aligned with the Discovery scheme in terms of its scientific aims, but it is misaligned in terms of the size of funding—to put it simply, my research project is often too small for a major grant like ARC Discovery. The amount of money I would request does not justify spending substantial time and effort for developing a long proposal document. If there was a subcategory of the Discovery scheme in which the amount of funding would be small and proposals could be simpler, it would lower the barrier to participation in the funding competition for researchers like myself.

Somewhat related to my comments in Q4, I think evaluation of proposals should be done by a more diverse group of people. Another issue of current ARC funding is the dominance of senior (in particular, level-E male) researchers. One possible cause of this may be that people who review the proposals predominantly consist of senior researchers. I think it is important to give voice to more junior researchers. For example, how would a proposal favoured by a College of Experts member look to ECRs and HDR students? If they didn't think highly of the proposal, should it still be funded?

Submission received

14 December 2022

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