Kathy Bowrey

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Kathy Bowrey

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.

This joint submission is informed by evidence produced in: Producing, Managing and Owning Knowledge in the 21st Century University (ARC DP200110578). This ARC Discovery Project investigates ownership of research produced in Australian universities and how to facilitate broader access to this research. It includes a consideration of comparative research policies and interviews about the impact of the role of funders and other government agencies on the research ecosystem conducted in Australia, the UK and EU in 2021-2.

The objects of the Act should prioritise public good outcomes from publicly funded research. This requires specifying a role for the ARC in shaping the research landscape by promoting greater dissemination of research which enables research impact and engagement. This priority should be facilitated by strengthening open research mandates, in line with funders, research policy and legislation in other jurisdictions that mandate immediate open access and support university rights retention. The ARC should look closely at UK and EU examples as well as noting or mirroring the most recent US OA stipulations.

There is also a need for the ARC Act, ARC governance and policy frameworks to formally acknowledge the sovereign rights of First Nations’ Peoples engaged in research and in collaborations with First Nations’ Peoples. Current ARC practice mischaracterises and downgrades or downplays issues of self-determination and ownership as mere matters of research ethics.

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 proposed board is welcome. However, representation needs to balance senior management experience with greater understanding of the day-to-day researcher experience and the institutional frameworks funded researchers are required to work with. Workarounds of ARC policy are often implemented by research offices due to inflexibility at the ARC and a failure in communication between strata of governance.

Our interviews showed that compliance with ARC policies is inconsistent. There is little follow-up by the ARC about whether the open-access aspects of the policy have been followed. Many researchers and institutions ignore the ARC policy that funded research should be made openly available, because there are no systems of checks and balances to ensure compliance.

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.

Section 3(1)(i) of the Act refers to the making of ‘high quality recommendations to the Minister’. We support formal recognition of the importance of peer review as informing assessment of high quality and appropriate and responsible use of metrics informed by sub-disciplinary experts. Respect for the quality and authenticity of assessments should not be diluted or confused by proxies such as journal title. The availability of for profit assessment tools should not drive assessment criteria. Research indicates that adoption of particular proxies for quality can distort researcher behaviour in selection of publication venue and citation practice. These issues are discussed in Kathy Bowrey, Tom Cochrane, Marie Hadley, Jill McKeough, Kylie Pappalardo, and Kimberlee Weatherall, ‘Managing ownership of copyright in research publications to increase the public benefits from research’ Federal Law Review, forthcoming 2023.

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

We support the inclusion of a new ARC objective to prioritise public good outcomes from publicly funded research to strengthen the social licence. Public understanding and benefits to the community will be enhanced by a stronger commitment to accessibility to support Open Research beyond the current arrangements, and in line with trends in relevant overseas contexts, and as per the answer we have already given at 1 d. In other jurisdictions there are additional legislative provisions, such as a right to republication, that support greater access to new versions of research for non-academic audiences. Australia’s highly restrictive copyright law and a failure to support university rights retention, that is, the failure of universities to reserve sufficient rights in employee publications to hold copies in accessible repositories and avoid the statutory licence that applies to use these works in teaching, produces a comparative national disadvantage in communicating the results and benefits of Australian publicly funded research.

For several years now, the ARC has been subject to government and media scrutiny over the perceived risk that public funds may be used on research with little public benefit. It is understandably difficult for Australian taxpayers to appreciate the value of funded research when they cannot see the outputs produced from that research because those outputs are behind paywalls. It is our strong belief that improved access to research - through a stronger open access mandate by the ARC and rights retention by universities (and not publishers) - will preserve and strengthen the social licence for public funding of research. Open research is more likely to be translated into practical benefits for industry, government and citizenry.

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

Our research has highlighted that there is significant confusion among researchers and research offices about ARC’s open access (OA) policy. There is a perceived burden of complying with the OA stipulations as they are currently written, and frustration with the uneven results of this policy due to inequitable access to support for providing open access under the dominant, publisher-controlled model that requires payment of article processing charges. Our research suggests that read and publish agreements or a sector wide agreement as investigated by the Chief Scientist will not address this problem but will increase the costs of conducting research and teaching in Australia.

The requirement that ARC College of Experts comply with a return rate, often around 70% of the funding request in some schemes, produces significant administrative burdens on College members, research offices and researchers. This ‘soft’ target leads to multiple budgets being produced for the same project and incentivises fictional accounting and game-playing. The capacity to deliver OA research at the end of the project is a frequent budget casualty due to a reduced award.

If we had a more harmonised approach to rights retention, and a national system that supports and enables more universal open access, with a threshold condition that the outputs are in a national network of accessible repositories, we should see greater consistency and reduced burdens - but this system needs national leadership as well as ARC leadership.

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?

There is some confusion and disengagement in the sector about the need for constant assessment. The measures adopted inevitably shift resources from doing research to administration and promotion activities as targeted by scheme requirements. To succeed it requires dedicated personnel to produce evidence portfolios and a whole new alienating language, taxonomy and graphic models have been invented to describe and classify different forms of achievement.

While we understand the drivers toward streamlining of the ERA or EI to reduce the drain on resources, entrenching quality assessment using publisher managed proxies for such assessments is not a saving due to system dependency over time. The adoption of particular platforms and measures distorts research priorities, impacts internal research opportunities and demoralises much genuine research engagement and impact that cannot be measured so readily. Case studies are not a helpful genre to explain the value and benefits of a vast amount of research and shift precious resources and research culture away from experimental, blue-sky and structural reform orientations that cannot demonstrate impact within scheme timeframes or be explained in terms of simple storytelling.

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?

We query the presumption in (a) that there is a need to demonstrate the ongoing value and excellence of Australian research in different disciplines. We note that Humanities and climate science researchers have been disproportionally scrutinised for political reasons that do not sit well with a commitment to research excellence and freedom of expression. There is a need to match research evaluation to well defined questions about the Australian research community- also noting that much of the research evaluated is not funded by the ARC or supported by any public funders.

(c) We do not support a data-driven methodology for the reasons given in Q8. Such general tools are not required to address the diversity of research on scale. Rather, support for Open Research (including open access and open data) and a text and data mining exception in the Copyright Act would facilitate targeted research being conducted about Australian research capability in particular fields by relevant experts.

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?

Our research team would welcome the opportunity to share further details about the evidence we have drawn upon in drafting the above response, including developments and future directions with policies overseas.


Professor Kathy Bowrey, Faculty of Law and Justice, University of NSW

Emeritus Professor Tom Cochrane, Queensland University of Technology

Dr Marie Hadley, Newcastle Law School, University of Newcastle

Emerita Professor Jill McKeough, Faculty of Law, University of Technology, Sydney

Dr Kylie Pappalardo, Law School, Queensland University of Technology

Professor Irene Watson, Pro Vice Chancellor Aboriginal Leadership and Strategy, University of South Australia

Professor Kimberlee Weatherall, The University of Sydney Law School, University of Sydney

Submission received

12 December 2022

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