Joshua Cinner

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Joshua Cinner

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.

I don't know that the balance of Discovery vs linkage programs needs to be legislated, since this will reduce agility, but a legislated minimum percentage of Discovery programs could help ensure the future of basic science

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.

A board should be re-established

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 could specify the expectations for appointments to the college of experts and for executive directors. For example, it could legislate that they must be "academic discipline leaders with research
experience, and hold the high regard of their respective research communities" which would serve to prevent the appointment of industry lackeys but not be overly prescriptive.

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.

The Ministerial veto must be abolished. It has been used as a political weapon and faith in the ARC has suffered greatly. I can understand that there may be extreme instances where, say, emerging national security concerns require further review beyond the expertise of conventional academics. In these instances, there could be a panel of national security advisors who independently review the proposal in light of concerns flagged by the minister. They should be able to provide an assessment as to whether the entire proposal presents a national security risk, or whether aspects of the proposal require modification before it could be funded, which the researcher should have the opportunity to work through with the panel. This may mean that the finding announcement includes a "pending national security review" section for the extreme minority of proposals, but transparency is critical.

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

the NIT does nothing to strengthen social license- it is based on faulty assumptions about what social licence is and completely misses where the potential levers for strengthening social licence are. If the ARC was interested in strengthening social licence for publicly funded research, it should leverage the decades of social science expertise on social license by running a special research initiative. It could also engage with the Academy of Social Science in Australia to commission a report.

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 peer review system needs a major revamp. For example, a major duplication of effort for researchers is because there is not adequate feedback given on unsuccessful proposals. Thus, researchers have no idea what to revise the following year. The ARC should provide panel/College of Expert scores and comments during the rejoinder stage and provide any additional information discussed by the panel. The National Science Foundation provides information and panel recommendations. Doing so might take longer and thus require a larger College of Experts, but imagine a world where researchers had some idea about how they could improve their proposal.

Likewise, in the Laureate Scheme, only the top 50 proposal as ranked by the panel are even considered. Yet all proposals are sent out for review. This means that 120 proposals are reviewed by 4 reviewers (if those take 1 day to review, that is 480 person-days at E level), and rejoinders are requested (those typically take researchers a week to respond to, which is a total of 600 person-days (5 x 120)). This 1080 person-days represents >4 full years of an E-level salary time wasted on reviewing and doing rejoinders for proposals that are never even in the running. A less wasteful process would cull the applicants after the panel assessments and not progress those. If the process were more transparent and dynamic (i.e. researchers informed if they get knocked out at each stage will help researchers and partners plan better).


How about sending researchers an email about the outcomes of grants they applied for? I find out about decisions from ARC Tracker on Twitter. That is not becoming of an institution like the ARC.

An expression of interest process for bigger schemes like Laureate Fellowships.

Submission received

08 December 2022

Publishing statement

Yes, I would like my submission to be published and my name and/or the name of the organisation to be published alongside the submission. Your submission will need to meet government accessibility requirements.