Igor Bray

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Igor Bray

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 ARC Act must not micromanage ARC activities. It should only express that the ARC funds research of international excellence and impact for humanity as a whole (not just Australia). ARC should not be asked to shape the research landscape, but seek to be a service-led organisation providing resources to the Australian researchers.

It would be good to state that the ARC should be resourced at or above the OECD average percentage of GDP. I suspect the Act is not the place to do this, but thought to raise it anyway.

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.

The governance should insist that ARC be a service-led organisation responsible to the researchers, via the Board. Its performance should be regularly assessed by the Board by giving researchers an opportunity to address the range of funding programs provided by the ARC and their administration.

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 Act should not be prescriptive at all. While the ARC should be accountable to the government of the day via the Board, the government of the day must not interfere in any ARC internal processes or outcomes.

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, peer review is fundamental to ensuring international excellence. Furthermore, external reviews must be the sole determinants of the outcomes, with the internal ARC panels acting as editorial boards respecting the external assessments. When I was on the ARC panels in the early 2000s, we had around 80% international peer reviewers. However, their views were barely considered in the outcomes. Not surprisingly, by the time I served for the second time in the mid 2010s this number became more like 20%.

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 do believe that public funding of research should pass "the pub test". The benefit of the research, to humanity as a whole (not necessarily Australia), needs to be able to be communicated in a believable way to the average tax-payer. If this is not able to be done, then the research should not be funded by the tax-payer. The Board, via the internal ARC panels, should provide this oversight, but not the government of the day.

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

Most importantly, the ARC should ensure that the cost of administration also includes the time of the researchers in their engagement with the ARC. For many decades the ARC myopically argued that its administrative processes were particularly efficient. This ignored the enormous amount of wasted time researchers spent constructing massive applications, and this includes even the 20% successful ones.

Should the ARC become a service-led organisation then it would extensively consult with its stake-holders to ensure the most efficient administrative practices.

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.

Presently the ARC has many fundamental flaws that other international funding bodies do not have. For example,
1. Conflicts of Interest: In most countries, if you are an applicant you are not an assessor! This is not the case in Australia. This should apply not only to the external researchers, but also to members of internal ARC panels. When I was on the internal ARC panels I was also a successful applicant, worthy of course, but not a good look! To enable this the ARC needs to first rebuild its database of international researchers who are willing to assess Australian applications. With external to Australia peer review being the dominant determinant of outcomes the CoI problem would be greatly diminished.
2. Assessments should be made solely on the information available to the applicant. Presently, the scoring of the application by the internal ARC panels is hidden from the applicant. The scores of external reviewers are also hidden from the applicant. This needlessly diminishes transparency.
3. Members of the internal ARC panels should not be asked to score any of the applications, but instead act as an Editorial board by respecting the primacy of the external expert reviewers.
4. The ARC should ask that the budget in the application be assessed against value for money. This should contribute to the final peer-review score. The ARC panels should fully fund successful applications, and not engage in budget cutting (to maintain a 20% success rate), as this removes any accountability on the proposed research, and artificially inflates the success rate.

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?

a. A complete waste of time, as demonstrated by the last decade or so of ERA. This has been needlessly wasteful activity. We already know from the numerous number of international rankings that Australian Universities perform well on the international stage. Research funding should come directly to the researchers who are responsible for the successful applications to the ARC.
b. This is a solved problem by the various university ranking schemes. Let's not waste any more resources on it.
c. No, ERA and EI are needless activities that do not add value. The wasted resources would be better spent on funding more outstanding applications.
d. N/A

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?

This is overreach for the ARC. ARC should fund individual applications as it has done for many decades prior to ERA (and now EI) coming along and wasting everybody's time. This is not an activity that adds value, just wastes valuable resources that could instead fund worthy applications.

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?

Firstly, thank you for the opportunity to provide feedback. The biggest problem is the lack of funding, relative to international standards, coming to the ARC for funding research applications. Australia is a very wealthy country, and it should contribute more than its fair share of the research into solving problems of global significance. With whatever funding ARC receives it needs to focus on distributing this to the researchers via the many excellent program that it supports such as the Centres of Excellence, Fellowships through to Discoveries and Linkages. Doing this well is hard enough. It should not waste its precious resources on ERA and EI activities, which should be scrapped.

Submission received

12 November 2022

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