Anonymous #23

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Anonymous #23

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 discussion paper shows that ~ $490 million of the total government research support of $11.83 billion is given to the ARC Discovery program, which is the only dedicated program in the country to support basic fundamental research.
This is less than 5%, and is exceptionally low considering that almost all applied and industry aligned research developments originate as basic fundamental research. I believe the ARC and overall research system in Australia would be greatly strengthened by dedicated a much more reasonable percentage of overall research funding to basic research, of ~20%. A legislative change to this effect would enable basic research funding to rise as overall research spend rises in coming years.

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 consider that the proposed ARC Board governance process would be an improvement on the current process, but could also be strengthened considerably. The opinion of the ARC Board as to a person who is ‘held in high regard by the research community’ may differ considerably from the opinion of the actual research community. The research community would consider at a minimum that a person as CEO or Board member would need to have a distinguished research career involving considerable publications that were well cited, and had impact in their field, and not only a person with a career mainly in research administration or management.
I believe that this would be strengthened by having the CEO and Board become elected positions, with academic societies or bodies such as the ARC College of Experts voting on these positions.

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?

As above, I believe the ARC act could be strengthened if the CEO position was elected. This would mean that the opinion of experts and researchers would be sought and expressed each time a new CEO was found.

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, in my view the ARC Act currently allows for far too much political interference in the grants process. Research needs to be far above politics in order to enable researchers to conduct their work in an impartial, safe, rigorous, and disciplined way, and for the public and research community to have confidence in the results. Peer review needs to be sole criteria for approval.

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 believe it is very important that the wider community understand the benefit of research. I consider that the National Benefit section of ARC grants already covers this criterion adequately in terms of assessing the outcomes from a researcher perspective. Therefore, there is no need for an additional NIT section.

The ARC, peak academic and research bodies, CSIRO and Universities working together could take a much more active role, together with grant holders, to publicise and communicate research outcomes to the wider community. This needs to be an integrated effort bringing together multiple stakeholders in large scale consolidated and on-going media campaign to inform, educate and interest the community in the outcomes of publicly funded research. It could mean, for example, that a set percentage of every grant (~say 1%) needs to be spent on documented outreach activities with channels to do this in a streamlined way.

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

It is very important the ARC processes become more streamlined. Universities, partners and researchers need certainty, and the current ~1 year time frame for grant assessment and approval precludes that for many ECRs who are pursuing a research career and need to plan their lives. Women in particular, who are often taking time off for parental leave in their 30s as ECRs, are particularly effected by the uncertainty around time frames, due dates, scheme changes and long waits for outcomes of ARC fellowship and grants schemes.

As a personal case study, I had 2 children while being mainly funded in terms of my salary by ARC FT, ARC DP and LP schemes. It was common for approximately 9 years of my life that as each project came to an end, I did not know where I would be working or living in the next year, and whether my family would need to move to another city or even country. This impacted my family planning decisions, health and my maternity leave. For example, I wrote an ARC DP grant application while I had a 2 week old newborn baby, to the detriment of my own and baby’s wellbeing, as I would have been out of a job in future if I had not applied at that time for that scheme. I also found out that I had not received an ARC grant during a Christmas Day family event, as the results had been announced on Christmas Eve when the University was already shut down for the year. This should have been anticipated and planned well in advance.

These outcomes could have been avoided by moving to much more rapid assessment times, for to ~6 months as an assessment time frame, with published and set dates for schemes allocated well in advance, and rules that do not change except with long notice. This is more in line with my experience overseas in other major funding rounds such as the German Government's DFG, US Government's NSF, UK Government's major rounds, which generally take a matter of a few months to deliver decisions.

In terms of duplication of effort of researchers, the fact that each new application requires the applicant to enter many and considerable details of their cvs and track records, even if they have entered the exact same information in 3 ARC application forms in the past 12 months, is an onerous duplication of effort. In RMS, there should be a system whereby information on each applicant is recorded separately to individual project information. Therefore applicants would only be required to login, update and modify their track records for each new application. In terms of my experience with other funding bodies in other countries, I have some experience with the research grants processes in Japan, New Zealand, US, Germany, Singapore, Belgium, Iceland, the Netherlands and Hong Kong. Of all of these, the ARC processes and requirements are by far the most onerous in terms of paperwork. For grant applications that I have assessed of major EU funding of several million Euros, it is common for applications to be less than a third the size of a typical ARC DP application, which can easily be >100 pages in length.

This additional effort particularly deters women from applying, as on average they carry a higher teaching and administrative load across many Universities in Australia. Therefore streamlining this effort will allow more women to apply to the ARC and likely change the deficiency in terms of applications from women researchers.

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.

The fact that women have such a low application rate in comparison to men, and that the success rate for men on Level E is far above the success rate of other groups of applicants, including women on Level E, points to failures to promote excellence and facilitate research.
The NHMRC has a gender equity committee and strategy, here: https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/research-policy/gender-equity, which ensure that their policies promote gender equity and women’s participation, which ultimately lead to better research outcomes. I believe the ARC needs to also have a similar strategy.
A committee such as this may come up with their own suggestions as to how to achieve this. A suggestion may be to allocate equal funds to men and women/gender neutral. This would strongly encourage more female applicants and circumvent unconscious bias on the part of peers and experts. Another approach would be to conduct double blind peer review, whereby peers and experts assess only the project description section of the grant, and a separate group with a stronger awareness of unconscious bias assess the track records of applicants in an unrelated process.

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?

The ARC already collects a considerable amount of information on outcomes and impacts, through its final reporting process and even in the application itself, whereby applicants need to input which ARC grant a particular publication or output relate to. Thereby, I believe that the ARC does not need additional burdens such as the ERA exercise. They can simply change their final reporting process so that it fulfils this role more closely, and includes research impact evidence.

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?

Yes, I agree with this approach. Such a group may also assist in promoting the outcomes of research to the wider community.

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 believe that the confidence of the research community in the ARC has been badly shaken over the past 10 years, due to a combination of: the politicisation of the grant funding decisions process, seemingly arbitrary changes to schemes and dates, increasing length of applications, decreasing success rates due to lower funding leading to a decline in applications as people give up, and the data showing that certain groups are much more likely to obtain funding than others.

One outcome of this review should be to find ways to restore confidence of the research community in the ARC.

Submission received

07 December 2022

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