Anonymous #14

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Anonymous #14

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.

a. The scope of research funding needs to be amended to include all fundamental basic research, no matter where the research is conducted. This also impacts c. the research landscape of Australia.

Currently ARC discriminates against Medical Research Institutes, which are not eligible for funding, despite the fundamental discovery of essential biological processes that is being performed. As a regular reviewer for ARC, I see many projects from universities, conducting similar discovery research as my team which are funded by ARC. ARC should decide funding eligibility based on the research being done, not on where it is performed.

I understand that ARC does not want to overlap in research scope with the NHMRC, current research policy does not stop this (and as a reviewer, I have seen the same grants in each scheme). Therefore, ARC should either
1. Stop the current discrimination and open funding eligibility to all (independent of location - there are fundamental discoveries that are currently not being made because of the current policy), or
2. Specify that a researcher (and their entire lab) can not have funding (of any sort) from both NHMRC and ARC (ie NHMRC investigator/Ideas AND Discovery grants, or postdocs in their lab with Decra or Future fellowship funding).

Submission received

04 December 2022

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