Anonymous #17

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Anonymous #17

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 clear statement should be made that the ARC funds fundamental research, that is not directly application driven (via the discovery scheme). Blue sky research must be possible as a key pillar in the Australian research landscape

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 ARC should be overseen by experts from the university sector, namely academics. Funding decisions need to be independent from political interference to provide unbiased funding opportunities. This is required to restore trust in the ARC.

Further, the evaluation model of the ARC should be changed from the current Australian-dominated peer review to fully international peer review. The Australian academic sector is too narrow to allow for truely unbiased evaluations of researchers. International peer review would largely remove this bias and constant conflict of interest. the current system is often more a popularity contest rather than objective peer review.
Further, also the college of experts should be dominated by international members for the same reason. A good example for such reform can be seen in Belgium, where national academics have been entirely replaced in expert peer review, and mostly replaced in evaluation panels for exactly this reason.

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?

see Q2 about international peer review and international members of the college of experts. Generally, a more robust peer review system is required (which must also include more guidance of reviewers, see for example the EU commission review system)

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.

again, international peer review is the key for more objective and more fair assessments

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

clearer communication about the role of fundamental research, and how this leads eventually to applied research and economic benefits need to be provided to the public. It is important to show that fundamental research, while not following an economic and more random rational eventually lead to job creation and economic benefits. this can be done on examples in the Australian research sector in the past, for example the development of Wifi, or IVF

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

The National Interest Test is not required for discovery type research. For linkage type research it is a useful addition

The addition of publication lists is tedious, and often not helpful for assessors, since this information is broadly available online anyway. Also, less focus should be put on the past experience of researchers, and more on the potential for future research. ROPE sections can be largely shortened. This would reduce the burden on ROs and academics, and on assessors significantly.

The focus on formatting in the application procedure has reached levels that are unreasonable. Researchers and ROs spend more time on finding accurate font sizes in Figures rather than working on the science itself. A more flexible format would be helpful, and reduce significant stress on all sides of the process.

international PIs often have to difficulties to fill their personal sections in RMS. This should be simplified. Also the declaration of foreign funding for international partners is difficult, and is often hard to communicate to partners why they need to open their books for this, when they themselves do not receive any funding from the ARC

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.

more collaboration agreements with other countries, joint project calls

international peer review

better guidance for assessors, clearer assessment categories, and guidance what is and what is not assessable. For example, the EU commission requires assessors to reach a consensus report, and the process is overseen by senior assessors who will remind assessors if they make unfair assessments, or if they assess features of an application that is a not assessable (in that specific category). This is quite some work, but it results in much fairer, concise and precise reviews.

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) future potential is more important than past performance
b) automatic evaluation of publications maybe
c) no
d) na

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?

a)only in a qualitative way. We need to step away from the need to quantify research outcomes. This is in itself problematic, and any introduced metric so far had only the consequence that researcher tweak their output to that metric without necessarily improving research quality.

b) rather than metrics, we should try to gather information on actual capabilities and domain expertise. This would allow to identify gaps more easily. While FOR codes are useful, they often dont catch the finer details.

c) potentially yes. Knoweldge extraction for example from publications could be a very useful tool here

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?

In the global competition of attracting the best researchers, the ARC generally needs more funds to fund more high class research. Further, we need more attarctive scholarship schemes to attract ECRs and high potentials alike. Right now, especially in the ECR realm, there are too little funding opportunities. We need for example a postdoc scheme underneath the DECRA scheme to give an entry point for fresh graduates, from Australia, or international candidates.
Researchers will move to where they have the best future possibilities, and currently Australia is significantly behind many other attractive countries in terms of funding success rates, and individual packages for starting a career. The people who start their career in Australia dont do so because they find excellent environments for their work, but often only for private reasons.

Submission received

05 December 2022

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