Peter Woelert

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Peter Woelert

Responses

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

There is a range of anecdotal evidence suggesting that ARC grant application processes are seen to be burdensome by applicants, including if compared with similar funding schemes of overseas funding bodies. The following initiatives and actions could contribute to the objective of reducing administrative burden associated with ARC research grant processes.

1.) It is recommended that a dedicated working group should be established within the ARC to monitor the administrative burden associated with ARC grant processes and to make recommendations for how such burden could be reduced. This working group should seek feedback from researchers and reviewers on aspects of the ARC grant process that appear to be particularly burdensome and invite suggestions for improvements on a regular basis. The group should also regularly review and benchmark the administrative burden associated with ARC grant processes against that associated with comparable schemes offered by key overseas funding bodies and, on that basis, identify ‘best practice’ principles facilitating a reduction in administrative burden.

2.) There is scope for reducing administrative burden associated with ARC grant processes by following the lead of the NHMRC and asking applicants to only list what they regard as their 10 best publications in their grant applications. The administrative burden associated with the ARC’s current practice of asking applicants to provide information on all their past publications in addition to their self-identified top 10 publications can be significant. For applicants in particular, the burden is increased further by the ARC’s RMS system, which tends to be cumbersome to navigate and prone to errors when it comes to the importing of publication records. In addition to reducing administrative burden, a focus on applicants’ 10 top publications in ARC grant applications would also support other important objectives such as helping” drive sectoral change to value research quality rather than quantity of publications” and making “assessment of publications equitable for applicants across all career stages and research fields.”

3.) The current practice of asking applicants for key ARC grant schemes to provide detailed information on and justifications for each individual item of their research budgets in their research grant applications is a source of considerable and, ultimately, unnecessary burden. This reflects the fact that the amounts of ARC grant funding that are ultimately allocated to successful applicants can be well below the grant funds requested. In the case of key schemes such as the ARC Discovery, for example, the difference between requested and awarded grant funding is usually quite significant. This means that the detailed research budgets and budget justifications provided in the initial grant applications are usually no longer current at the time when funding is awarded, and that entirely new budgets have to be developed by successful applicants that reflect the actual funding levels awarded. In view of this frequently occurring discrepancy between requested and awarded grant funds, it is recommended that consideration should be given how to reduce the administrative burdens associated with the provision of research budgets in ARC applications. This could take the form of asking for outlines of research budgets in grant applications that contain estimates for key expenditure in line with specific templates provided by the ARC but where, for example, no detailed justification is required for any smaller budget items the cost of which lies below a certain threshold.

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.

How to improve the transparency of ARC grant selection processes

The review of each ARC grant application usually involves the use of expert reviewers (‘Detailed Assessors’) and members of the ARC’s Selection Advisory Committee (‘General Assessors’) who both comment on and score each proposal against relevant criteria. All scores are then combined to form the overall application score. Freedom of Information (FoI) requests have shown that, occasionally, scores provided by ‘Detailed Assessors’ may be excluded from the calculation of the overall application score.

Currently, applicants only receive very little specific information on how their proposal has been rated by both Detailed and General Assessors. For example, as part of the initial review process, applicants are routinely provided with the written reports provided by the Detailed Assessors but do not receive any information on the Detailed Assessors’ scores allocated to the key application criteria. Similarly, applicants whose proposal for funding was unsuccessful do receive a broad summary of how competitive their application was compared to all other non-funded applications, but neither any information on the various scores awarded by the Detailed and General Assessors to their application nor even the overall application score. Information on all scores can be requested by applicants through a FoI request, which is however costly and burdensome for the relevant parties involved.

It is recommended that transparency of ARC grant selection processes could be improved by making all or at least some assessor scores available to applicants. This could take the form of providing applicants with Detailed Assessor scores when releasing initial proposal reviews and sharing Detailed and General Assessor scores with applicants after the announcement of grants. All applicants should also be informed when Detailed Assessor reports have been excluded from calculation of the overall application score, potentially including a brief rationale for the omission.

Overall, the added transparency concerning assessor scores will enable applicants to get a clearer idea of how their application was viewed by various parties involved in the selection process and, in doing so, will ultimately strengthen the legitimacy of ARC selection processes within the academic community and beyond.

Submission received

14 December 2022

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